CBC News reports on Strava’s lawsuit against Garmin, which alleges patent infringement and breach of contract. Strava claims that Garmin is violating Strava’s patents relating to heatmaps and segments, and also says Garmin’s new developer guidelines require the Garmin logo to be present in every single post and image: “We already provide attribution for every data partner, but Garmin wants to use Strava and every other partner as an advertising platform.” Athletes who rely on both Garmin and Strava are just a bit concerned. (It may be worth mentioning that Strava added restrictions on third-party apps to its own API last year: see DC Rainmaker and The Verge.) Garmin isn’t commenting (pending litigation, etc., etc.).
Category: GPS
More on Suspected Russian GPS Interference in the Baltic
Lots of coverage at Polish news network TVP World on suspected Russian GPS jamming in the Baltic region. A report submitted by the Baltic states to ICAO found that 123,000 flights were disrupted by GPS jamming in the first four months of 2025; 27.4 percent of flights were disrupted in April. Sweden’s transport agency says it’s getting near-daily reports of GPS jamming from pilots: “Since late 2023, reported GNSS disruptions to the Swedish Transport Agency have surged from 55 in 2023 to 495 in 2024, with a preliminary count of 733 incidents in 2025 as of August 28.” GPS disruptions in the region have been traced to a facility in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Suspected Russian GPS Interference Affects European Commission President’s Plane
Russia is suspected of engaging in GPS jamming that disrupted the navigation systems of a plane carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on a flight to Plovdiv, Bulgaria: BBC News, The Guardian, Reuters. It’s the latest incident in which Russia has been accused of jamming or spoofing GPS signals in nearby states.
Previously: The Russians Are Spoofing! The Russians Are Spoofing!; Russia Accused of Jamming Civilian Flights’ GPS; CBC News on Russian GPS Jamming.
Exploring GPS Alternatives
In March the FCC issued a Notice of Inquiry to explore GPS alternatives, citing increasing threats to the resiliency of the existing GPS network. GPS World worries that the U.S. may limit domestic access to non-U.S. navigation systems (Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS), which many devices support, for security reasons.
Breathless coverage in TechCrunch for one such alternative, Tern AI, a startup that promises GPS-free navigation. From what I can gather, it relies on a combination of car sensors, onboard maps and dead reckoning, helped along with a liberal sprinkling of AI fairy dust, to arrive at a fix within a few minutes. Now, I’m reflexively skeptical of all things AI, so I’m not holding my breath; this sounds like a modern-day Etak Navigator with machine learning.
A joint project between Australia and India, involving RMIT University and space firm SkyKraft, is exploring setting up a regional navigation system based on low-earth orbit satellites.
GPS on the Moon: I’ve reported previously on the idea that Earth-orbiting GNSS satellites could be used for lunar navigation. The tech company GMV announced results of field testing for the LUPIN project, which aims to bring navigation to the moon based on lunar-orbiting satellites. Neither the press release nor the coverage (Engadget, Reuters) is particularly revealing, though.
My, that’s a lot of vague press releases.
Adventures in Unpreparedness
Two recent cautionary tales about the risks of going forth without proper navigational tools. First, I’m a bit confused about this BBC News report, which cites what3words as coming through when a boat broke down in the Channel Islands area:
[The rescue service] said although the vessel had no working on board GPS and an inoperative VHS radio, crews were able to establish a position using the location app “what3words”. […]
The coastguard said an operator was able to translate the vessel’s what3words location from a mobile phone into latitude and longitude.
Now hold on: if you’re able to use what3words on a mobile phone to get a fix on your location, it’s because your phone has a built-in GPS, so it’s not like they didn’t have access to GPS. More likely is that they couldn’t figure out how to get lat/long coordinates to rescue services in any other way. (It’s a long press on your location in either Apple Maps and Google Maps, but to be fair, that might not be obvious or easy to figure out for the first time in the middle of a crisis.)
Meanwhile, an unprepared hiker without a map who got lost in New Hampshire will likely be billed for the cost of his rescue.
Quantum Navigation
Quantum navigation systems are being tested in Britain. Last month there was a successful test flight of an aviation system, and a system is being tested on test trains on the London Underground. (It’s not clear to me whether these systems are related, but the U.K. has apparently been making a big push into quantum tech lately.) Quantum navigation is essentially quantum mechanics applied to dead reckoning, using the properties of supercool atoms to measure change of position. The advantage of the system is that it’s self-contained: it doesn’t require a GPS signal or navigation beacon to triangulate from, which makes it resistant to jamming or spoofing—and considering how essential real-time location data has become, and how easy it is to disrupt location signals, the appeal of a self-contained solution is self-evident.
CBC News on Russian GPS Jamming
CBC News reports on GPS jamming by Russia, which has closed the airport in Tartu, Estonia until authorities could install a backup ground-based beacon. Russia has been accused of messing with GPS signals for years, but the CBC report focuses on the idea that in this case the jamming is at least in part to deal with Ukrainian drone attacks—the implication being that insofar as Estonia is concerned, this is collateral damage (to which Russia is presumably indifferent at best).
See also the BBC News story from earlier this month (previously).
Solar Storms and Precision Agriculture Don’t Mix
We were warned that this weekend’s solar storm could have an impact on GPS and navigation systems. 404 Media reports that it’s causing outages in the GPS and real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning systems used in many farmers’ tractors, right in the middle of planting. This is a bigger problem than you might think: quite a lot of crops are grown using precision agriculture, “with farmers using increasingly automated tractors to plant crops in perfectly straight lines with uniform spacing. […] If the planting or harvesting is even slightly off, the tractors or harvesters could damage crops or plant crooked or inconsistently, which can cause problems during the growing season and ultimately reduce yield.” To say nothing of the harvest. Precision agriculture achieves centimetre-level accuracy, but also relies on it, and losing it at one step of the process can’t be good. [Engadget, The Verge]
G5-Scale Geomagnetic Storm in Progress
The Earth is being hit by a solar storm at the moment; NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has observed severe (G5) geomagnetic storm conditions for the first time since 2003. Among other impacts, this may disrupt GPS and other navigation systems. On the other hand this also means aurorae where they’re rarely seen: see SWPC’s aurora dashboard for maps.
Previously: NOAA’s Aurora Forecasts.
Russia Accused of Jamming Civilian Flights’ GPS
BBC News: “Russia is causing disruption to satellite navigation systems affecting thousands of civilian flights, experts say. […] The persistent disruption led Finland’s flag carrier Finnair to suspend daily flights to Estonia’s second largest city, Tartu, for a month, after two of its aircraft had to return to Helsinki due to GPS interference. ¶ Tartu Airport relies solely on GPS, unlike most larger airports which have alternative navigation systems that allow aircraft to land even if the signal is lost.”
Flightradar24’s Map of GPS Interference
Another map of GPS interference, also based on GPS accuracy information reported by aircraft, this one from Flightradar24. Data updates every six hours. And once again high levels of interference are being reported from conflict zones: Ukraine and other foci of Russian mischief like the Baltics, plus Israel/Palestine, though to be honest I didn’t expect Myanmar. Data is archived, so you can look up previous dates (7 days free, more than that needs a site subscription). [Maps Mania]
Previously: GPSJam Maps GPS Interference.
Guidestar and GM’s Early Attempts at In-Car Navigation
The 1995 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight was the first production car in North America to be offered with an on-board navigation system, Guidestar. Car enthusiast website The Truth About Cars recently ran a six-part series on the road to that release, exploring General Motors’ earlier, experimental attempts at in-car navigation. The series starts with the very experimental, 1960s-era DAIR, which would have relied on in-road magnets; parts two, three and four of the series look at TravTek, a system combining (still-scrambled-for-civilian-use) GPS with road sensors that was tested on Oldsmobile rental cars in the Orlando, Florida area in the early 1990s. The series ends with a look at the background and development of the Guidestar system itself.
GPSJam Maps GPS Interference
GPS Jam, created by John Wiseman, is an online map of GPS interference, updated daily, based on GPS accuracy information reported by aircraft. It’s not necessarily a map of where GPS is being deliberately jammed, but when you look and see that the hotspots are the eastern Mediterranean, western Russia and the Baltics, well. Active war zones (e.g. Ukraine) are blank: this map is based on civilian aircraft data and those are no-go areas.
SMBC on GPS
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a take on what GPS does to our ability to navigate.
SuperGPS Promises Ten-Centimetre Accuracy
It seems to be steam engine time for GPS alternatives. We’ve already seen two proposals that suggest using constellations of low-flying satellites to provide greater accuracy and more resilience against signal blocking than GPS and other orbital navigation systems can provide. Now a research team in the Netherlands is developing a project called SuperGPS, which promises decimetre-level (10 cm) accuracy through the use of terrestrial transmitters connected to a fibre-optic network. They’ve built a working prototype, and published the results in Nature. More at the TU Delft news release.
Previously: Starlink as GPS Alternative; ESA Considering Low-Orbit Satellites to Improve Galileo System.