The fault lies with some inhibitors to confuse drones
All eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz, through which it passes 20% of the world’s oil. Chaos reigns in this funnel of just 33km and there is something that is contributing to complicating everything much more: the GPS does not work. It is not a specific problem, it is something increasingly common that is having consequences that go beyond the war itself. Chaos in Hormuz (even more). They count on BBC There are hundreds of ships in the Strait of Hormuz area and the location systems place them in positions that make no sense; some are stacked on top of each other, others form impossible circles on the earth… The cause is that their GPS coordinates have been altered by some type of inhibitor. This increases the risk of maritime collisions, especially if visibility is poor. Objective: confuse. In a complete report of Wall Street Journalsay that GPS signal jammers and spoofers have become an essential tool in conflict zones like Ukraine and, now Iranas you can see on this map. What they do is confuse drones and guided munitions so that they fail. Works. The Ukraine conflict has shown that these systems work. According to a report delivered to the US department of defensethe accuracy of Excalibur artillery was 70% when it was first used in Ukraine, but six weeks later it was only 6% thanks to “the Russians adapting their electronic warfare systems to counter it” with GPS jammers. Many of these devices are very affordable and fit in your pocket, making them very easy to use in the field. Consequences. In 2024, An American Airlines flight flew over Pakistan when the alert started to sound “pull up“, which is what it sounds like when the plane is too close to the ground, but the aircraft was at 32,000 feet above sea level. It was a GPS interference. In April of the same year, the airline Finnair suspended its flights to Tartu for a month. The reason: Russia. Airlines depend a lot on GPS and these interferences sometimes cause errors like the one we mentioned at the beginning. Flights have also had to be diverted to other airports for this reason, such as happened with the flight in which Ursula Von Der Leyen was traveling in September of last year. GPS cracks. He Global Positioning System It is a satellite navigation system created by the United States in the 1960s. It was created for military use, but it has ended up being part of the critical infrastructure of the digital economy. There are other similar systems that use satellites such as GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China) and Galileo (Europe), but GPS is the most used globally. The fact that we depend so much on GPS means that any degradation has a cascading impact on many essential services, but the signal also has to travel 20,000 kilometers from the satellite, so when it reaches us it is very weak. It is the perfect breeding ground to make it extremely easy to alter them. Solutions. The weaknesses of GPS make it urgent to search for robust alternatives for critical sectors such as aviation. There are the inertial navigation systems which use gyroscopes and accelerometers to calculate position and are already used in the aerospace industry, defense and autonomous vehicles. Also a system is being developed which uses quantum sensors that orient themselves with the Earth’s magnetism and cameras combined with AI algorithms are used to “read” the terrain. However, despite the weaknesses, GPS remains the most powerful system of all due to its ubiquity and accuracy. These systems do not cover the entire range, so the tendency is to use several sources to cover these gaps. In Xataka | Radar warning, detector and inhibitor: what is legal, what is not and why the DGT can fine me this Easter Image | gpsjam.org
