Nothing has changed in this 2024 compared to the last weeks of last year: many European countries bordering the Baltic Sea deal daily with interference and blocks of satellite navigation systems GPS. One of the most striking cases dates back to the Christmas holidays with a very large area that affected Poland, Scandinavia, Lithuania and recently also a part of German territory. It is clear that if these vehicles go haywire, both air and land navigation will be affected.
What does “Baltic Jammer” mean
“Poland, Sweden and Germany have been literally hit by GPS disturbances (presumably Russian) in the last few hours. Still“, writes about X John Wiseman attaching the map with the interferences. For this reason, an expression was also coined, Baltic Jammer, literally “interference in transmissions” (from the English verb to jam) in the Baltic area. But who would be behind all this? As hypothesized by the user, other experts also think that there is a hand in the Russia which intends to block and disturb the signals sent by satellites.
What are the causes
The reasons why it would do all this are quite obvious: in a regime of war against Ukraine, Moscow would be interested in carrying out this kind of “electronic warfare” to disturb everything that happens in the delicate Baltic area. To date, the possible causes of the outages are not officially known as no statement has been released on the matter. “However, it is assumed that the interfering signals are due to military activities a Kaliningrad“, we read on some specialized portals. On GpsJam you can observe what happens in real time and you actually notice the phenomenon around Putin’s enclave between Lithuania and Poland.
American and Polish experts explain that among the most probable reasons for GPS interference “the activation of an American anti-missile system in northern Poland in mid-December and Sweden’s entry into NATO”. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) of the United States also intervened in the matter and hypothesized actual electronic warfare exercises carried out by the Russians in Kaliningrad. But how strong is the “shield” that prevents GPS systems from working properly? According to some experts, at least for about thirty kilometers.
The disturbed signal
As you read above GpsWorldthe technology scholar Zach Clements of the University of Texas studied the possible sources of the interruption of GPS signals by discovering transmitters scattered over a large area: in some cases only the GPS signal was disturbed, in others a transmitter would also have been able to disturb the systems mounted on the planes so that the on-board instruments showed a non-real position. This phenomenon is known as “circle spoofing” and is much more typical of the naval sector. “With Circle Spoofing a receiver is electronically captured and ‘moved’ to a different location. So it is made to appear to move in circles, almost always clockwise.”
Clements is sure that the source of the spoofing was in Russia. “The points where the plane started to be affected by the spoofing and where they regained the genuine GPS indicate that the spoofer is somewhere in western Russia. Interestingly, the location where the planes were faked is a field about a kilometer from the decommissioned Russian Smolensk military air base.”.