We’ve seen before that solar storms can have an impact on GPS accuracy. A study published in Geophysical Research Letters determined that a severe geomagnetic storm in November 2025 caused positioning errors in excess of 10 metres—enough to disrupt autonomous vehicles and precision agriculture—and in mid-latitude regions that are normally calm. [ScienceAlert]
Category: GPS
‘The Unintended Consequences of Knowing Where We Are’
A New Yorker piece by Shayla Love looks at the consequences of our increasing dependence on GPS. It’s nominally about Katherine Dunn’s new book, Little Blue Dot (previously), but it’s one of those pieces that uses the book as a launching pad—talks about what the book talks about, rather than talking about the book in and of itself. Here’s a thought-provoking paragraph from Love’s piece:
Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads the Spatial Thinking Lab, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that by relying on G.P.S. we neglect an intrinsic navigation strategy: cognitive mapping, which depends on a spatial conception of the environment that is populated with landmarks such as trees or buildings. This approach is supported by “place cells,” specific neurons in the hippocampus, each of which represents a precise physical location. (One could think of them as the brain’s internal blue dots.) G.P.S. is more in line with a very different navigation strategy, stimulus response, which treats navigation as a series of motor responses: turn left, go five hundred feet, then turn right. This utilizes a different area of the brain, one that supports habitual learning. “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.
This is one of those lightbulb moments: I’ve never really relied on GPS receivers for navigation because my navigation strategy is pure cognitive mapping. I don’t follow directions when I travel, at least not unless I’ve worked out the general geography by poring over maps of the area first.
Low-Earth-Orbit Satellites as GPS Alternative
Ars Technica on plans by Xona Space Systems to launch a constellation of low-Earth-orbit navigation satellites. Compared with GPS, the satellites would be much more resistent to interference because their signals would be 100 times stronger; on the other hand, the system needs 258 satellites to achieve full coverage, not 24, and low-Earth orbit is getting a bit crowded.
Previously: ESA Considering Low-Orbit Satellites to Improve Galileo System.
Little Blue Dot
Out this week: Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World by Katherine Dunn. From the publishers’ descriptions (plural: it’s out from Bloomsbury in the U.S. and HarperCollins imprint Mudlark in the U.K.), it functions as a history of GPS, a look at its impact, and a warning about its vulnerabilities. The Walrus has published an excerpt, titled “How to Hack a Superyacht,” that explores the rise of GPS spoofing (which is using a device to replace the weak GPS satellite signal with one that gives false location data, as opposed to GPS jamming, which blocks the signal altogether—spoofing, Dunn says, is worse than jamming).
Buy: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop | Map Books of 2026
Space Jam
GPS jamming has come to space. Researchers have identified a Russian satellite as the source of 10-second radio bursts that have been disrupting GNSS signals.
Occasional bursts of energy from a Russian missile-detection satellite have been briefly disrupting satellite navigation across large parts of Europe, a pattern that may indicate a “qualitative escalation in GNSS [global navigation satellite system] interference.”
At least 75 times between 2019 and 2026, University of Texas researchers observed 10-second bursts of high-powered radio signals at 1558.5 MHz: the frequency used by GPS and European navigation satellites to transmit signals to Earth. The bursts disrupted GPS antennas from Romania to Greenland, the researchers write in a paper published this month in the journal Navigation.
The Physics of GPS
Shri Khalpada explains the physics of GPS. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.”
Previously: Bartosz Ciechanowski Explains GPS.
More on GPS Jamming in the Strait of Hormuz
BBC News on GPS jamming in the conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran:
The interference currently affecting ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz is far from the first time that [maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wise] Bockmann has observed GPS jamming impacting vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).
The same thing happened in this region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and electronic interference has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But, she says, “This is next-level.”
Previously: GPS Jamming and the Iran War.
GPS Jamming and the Iran War
GPS jamming has become pretty much endemic in every conflict, open, hybrid or frozen, so it’s no surprise that it’s going on in the Persian Gulf: “Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.” The CNN article goes on to explain why GPS (and other GNSS systems) are so vulnerable, and how spoofing and jamming have become so commonplace.
Gladys West, 1930-2026
Gladys West has died at the age of 95. An African-American mathematician who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia, West “devoted herself to solving one of science’s most complex challenges: accurately modeling the shape of the Earth. Her painstaking calculations and programming helped transform raw satellite data into precise geodetic models, enabling reliable satellite-based navigation. That work ultimately became the backbone of the Global Positioning System (GPS)—now essential to aviation, shipping, emergency response, smartphones, and daily life worldwide.”
Previously: Gladys West, GPS’s Hidden Figure.
GPS Jamming Reported Around Venezuela
How Imaging Quasars Improved GPS Accuracy
What do distant quasars have to do with improving GPS accuracy? A 2019 article from the NASA Technology Transfer Program explains: “In the 1960s, NASA used a network of radio telescopes and a technique called very large baseline interferometry (VLBI) to capture images of quasars in distant galaxies. In the following decade, scientists reversed the process to determine the precise locations of the telescopes, painting a picture of Earth’s shape and orientation in space. Today, an evolution of that technology supports another location-based system that has arguably become the world’s most important communication infrastructure: the Global Positioning System (GPS).” [Ariel Waldman]
Strava v. Garmin
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.).
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.