Monitoring Satellite Navigation Signals for Interference

As I explained in About SuperPacket, "Big Picture of Amateur Radio" articles like this will now be in my blog SuperPacket. This article has been copied there.

IEEE Spectrum published a 2021-03-03 article titled The Networks That Aim to Track GPS Interference Around the World.

(It's surprising that IEEE, despite its global membership and the worldwide audience of Spectrum, doesn't use the more accurate terminology of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). It's been years now that other GNSS systems besides US Global Positioning System [GPS] have come online.)

That GNSS systems can, and do, get jammed is well-known to the audience of this blog. I knew that the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) monitors GPS and provides ground based and satellite based correction data. Of course, the US military monitors GNSS systems for potential jamming (including their own, to see how effective theirs is).

But I wasn't aware of several crowdsourced GNSS monitoring networks:

International GNSS Service (IGS)

OpenSky Network

This paragraph leapt out at me:

Another problem facing both these systems is the sparse distribution of sensors, says Todd Humphreys, Director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at UT Austin: “There are fewer than 3000 GPS reference stations with publicly-accessible data across the globe; these can be separated by hundreds of miles. Likewise, global coverage by ships and planes is still sparse enough to make detection challenging, and localization nearly impossible, except around ports and airports.” 

What if... Amateur Radio operators and others worldwide that were interested in wireless experimentation "crowdsourced" GNSS receiver data from an inexpensive GNSS receivers?

This sounds like yet another "fertile area of research" for Amateur Radio. Now that Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) has now issued their 2021 Request for Proposals (PDF), perhaps some enterprising grad student or wireless experimenter could create an organization such as Satellite Network Open Ground Station (SatNOGS) Project or Ham Radio Citizen Science Investigation (HamSCI) to create a website, infrastructure, and reference designs to create a open source hobbyist GNSS monitoring network.

 

Thanks for reading!

Steve N8GN
Bellingham, Washington, USA