Tests suggest Russian satellites can jam GPS at continental scale

Global Positioning System (GPS) signals underpin almost every dimension of civilian life, and new research carried by Ars Technica suggests they may have a much wider attack surface than commonly assumed. Joint field tests in Europe indicate that Russian-attributed jamming satellites in orbit may have developed the capability to degrade GPS signals across an area the size of several countries.

The work was carried out by teams from the University of Bonn in Germany and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. The researchers tracked sources of growing GPS signal loss in eastern Europe and along the Black Sea over the past three years. The main conclusion the data point to is that the source is not a ground-based jammer but a small satellite in orbit.

The satellite is assessed to be part of a new generation of electronic warfare platforms described as jam-on-orbit. KTH researcher Sven Lindberg told Ars Technica that a single source with antenna-equipped solar panels can radiate energy across a wide area on parallel channels, giving it a far longer effective range than conventional ground jammers.

The GPS signal reaches receivers as a faint radio wave from roughly 30 satellites circling the Earth. Jamming overlays strong noise on that signal to prevent receivers from reading correct data; more sophisticated spoofing techniques inject false position data to mislead the receiver. The new research focuses mainly on jamming.

In terms of geographic footprint, the study identified signal drops during test days over Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, southern Finland and certain parts of Romania. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recently tagged pilot reports of GPS loss from those areas as high frequency. The study's timing matches those reports.

Civil aviation authorities in Georgia, Moldova and along the Caspian have said over the past year that they have updated backup navigation procedures for GPS reliability. ICAO's 2025 navigation report emphasised the importance of backup navigation and fast diagnostics for instrument errors across the GNSS family of systems. Those recommendations now carry additional urgency.

GPS interference affects not only civil aviation but also maritime navigation, precision agriculture GPS systems, telecom time synchronisation and the timing of financial transactions. Telecom operators rely on GPS signals for time synchronisation between base stations; a serious jamming wave can quickly complicate network management.

On countermeasures, the European Union's Galileo navigation system provides partial spoofing protection through its authenticated signal mode (OSNMA), but for protection against simple jamming it shares constraints similar to those of open civilian signals such as GPS. Multi-band receivers reduce the impact of single-frequency jammers, while multi-constellation solutions offer stronger resilience.

There is also renewed discussion about reviving eLORAN, a ground-based backup navigation system. The United Kingdom, the United States and Japan have restarted eLORAN trial programmes over the past three years. eLORAN is evaluated as a backup navigation option offering roughly 100-metre accuracy in the event of GPS signal loss.

In the broader picture, Ars Technica's reporting shows that GPS jammers are no longer a local tactical threat but a continental-scale infrastructure problem. The European Commission is expected to put the findings on the agenda of its autumn navigation workshop in Brussels. This is not military advice.