From Space, GPS Jamming Maps Who Is Tracking Whom

Pulsar-0 measured GPS signal loss from France to Pakistan. The pattern is not random. It tracks military operations, drone defense, and counter-surveillance.

State of Surveillance Editorial Team

View of Earth from low orbit with the curved horizon visible against the black of space, the kind of vantage the Pulsar-0 satellite uses to measure GPS signal loss across whole regions at once
Photo via Unsplash

TL;DR: A California company called Xona Space Systems put a small satellite into low orbit last year. The satellite carries a GPS receiver as a side instrument, to make sure its own positioning data lines up with the GPS network below. When the team turned that receiver on, they found something the team describes as much worse than expected: GPS signal strength dropping from a normal 40 decibels to as little as 10 decibels across wide stretches of Europe and the Middle East, in a pattern that follows military flashpoints, not weather or terrain.[1] The pattern reads cleanly as a map of counter-surveillance. Jamming concentrates where military operations are running, where drones need to be spoofed, and where states or non-state actors do not want their positions broadcast by American GPS receivers on every drone, smartphone, and guided munition within range. The Hacker News thread crossed 100 points at 14:07 UTC on 20 June 2026 (the second 100-point cross after the 11:44 UTC Day-2 anchor), holding front-page position 17 with a sustained post-100p settle of 0.40 points per minute. The Day-2 addendum added the cryptographic anti-spoofing layer the original coverage missed: Galileo OSNMA has been operational since 24 July 2025, GPS CHIMERA is forthcoming, and neither protects against jamming; both are themselves vulnerable to record-and-replay attacks against receivers that do not carry an atomic clock. The Day-3 addendum adds the new pushbacks on the Xona fix that the Day-1 and Day-2 addenda did not surface: the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth positioning fallback that makes consumer GNSS optional, the power-budget asymmetry between a satellite transmitter and a terrestrial jammer, the decade-long L5 experimental status that says the incumbent GPS stack is not modernizing at the threat-model pace, and the four-word framing the thread has now settled on: "JAM as a Service."

What Pulsar-0 found

Xona's Pulsar-0 launched in 2024 and orbits 310 miles above Earth. The satellite is the test article for a planned 300-satellite constellation Xona intends to begin deploying later this year. The point of the constellation is to broadcast a positioning signal from low orbit, where the signal is much stronger than GPS, the European Galileo system, or China's BeiDou. Strong signal is harder to jam.[1]

Pulsar-0 carries a stock GPS receiver as a side instrument, so the Xona team can verify that the new constellation and the old one agree on position and time. When they turned the receiver on, they expected to see normal GPS signal everywhere on Earth. They did not.

"When we fly over North America, for example, we see a beautiful signal all the time," Xona co-founder Kaz Gunning told Space.com. "But as soon as we started doing any operations above Europe, we noticed that there was really something going on there. We thought we were going to see some jamming, but it's quite a bit more than we expected."[1] In the worst-hit areas, GPS signal strength at the satellite dropped from the regular 40 decibels to as little as 10 decibels. A 30 dB drop is a thousand-fold reduction in signal power.

The jammed regions form a continuous band. Pulsar-0 saw serious GPS degradation all the way from France in the west to the borders of Pakistan in the east. The band sits where the ground-based jammers have line-of-sight to the GPS satellites in medium Earth orbit, 12,000 miles up. The implication is that any low-orbit constellation that depends on GPS for time-sync and positioning will lose GPS coverage over those same regions.[1]

Where the jamming is, and what it tracks

The jammed band is not random. It traces the line of active military operations across Europe and the Middle East.

Russian jammers have been disrupting GNSS signals along Russia's western borders since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The official purpose, per Russian statements and reporting by Reuters and the Financial Times, is to defend against Ukrainian drone attacks that use GPS for navigation. Every month, this interference affects tens of thousands of commercial flights that cruise over the region.[1]

Middle Eastern jammers run on the same logic. Warring parties across the region use GPS jamming and spoofing to deflect drone attacks and to hide the positions of ships at sea from targeting systems. Spoofing (overriding the real GPS signal with a fake one carrying wrong coordinates) and jamming (overpowering the real signal with noise) are the two operational tools, and they often run together.

The structural read is that the GPS jamming map is also a counter-surveillance map. Jamming concentrates where someone does not want to be located. The location data on every smartphone, drone, guided munition, ship, and connected vehicle is the asset the jammers are protecting themselves against. The Pulse-0 data confirms what privacy and anti-surveillance advocates have argued for years: GPS is a tracking infrastructure, and the actors with the strongest reasons to opt out are the ones doing the jamming.

The privacy side most coverage skips

Space.com's framing is that GPS jamming is a problem. The article reads as a coherent case for building a new positioning constellation that is harder to jam. Several Hacker News commenters pushed back hard on the framing. User random3 noted that the data comes from a company whose upcoming product is advertised to solve the problem the data describes, and which raised a $170 million Series C funding round this March. User skeptic_ai called the Space.com writeup the worst ad-ridden website they had ever read.[2]

User vachina cut to the underlying argument: "I honestly see this jamming as a win. GNSS is a global blanket opt-in American spyware."[2] That comment is the structural read privacy advocates have been pressing for over a decade. The GPS system was designed and is operated by the United States Air Force. Every civilian GPS receiver on the planet depends on a signal whose integrity is guaranteed by an American military authority. The signal is open and free, but the trust anchor is a state actor, and the same signal that lets a delivery driver find an address lets a cruise missile find a target.

The jamming data Xona published is, in that frame, the first space-based confirmation of where on Earth anti-tracking operations are most active. It is not a map of a technical failure. It is a map of contested ground between an American-built global tracking infrastructure and the actors who refuse to be tracked.

The proposed fix is more tracking infrastructure

Xona's plan is to launch six satellites in October and begin delivering basic Pulsar service by the end of 2026, with broader coverage rolling out through 2027 as the full 300-satellite constellation fills in. The pitch is that Pulsar's signal will be 100 times stronger than GPS at ground level, because the satellites are 40 times closer to Earth than the GPS constellation in medium orbit. Stronger signal means jammers must be closer and more powerful to disrupt, shrinking the radius of any single jammer's effect.[1]

The plan addresses a real technical problem. It also adds another commercial positioning layer with its own governance, its own terms of service, and its own downstream data trail. Pulsar customers will be early in timekeeping, per Xona's communications head Max Eunice, with the broader market following as coverage expands.[1] Every new positioning constellation is a new pipeline of location data, and every location-data pipeline has proven to be a target for law enforcement subpoenas, intelligence-agency cooperation, commercial data-broker resale, and breach exposure.

The state-level GPS tracking beat is not hypothetical. India is currently considering a proposal from the country's telecom industry to make always-on satellite tracking mandatory across all 735 million Indian smartphones, an architecture that would convert every handset in the country into a continuous location-reporting device.[3] The location data broker industry in the United States pulled in billions before the FTC began enforcing against it in 2024, and Kochava, Mobilewalla, Gravy Analytics, Venntel, InMarket, and X-Mode have all settled FTC actions in the past 18 months.[4]

Each new positioning constellation makes the underlying asset more available and harder to refuse. The fix to GPS jamming proposed by Xona is a fix that puts more positioning data into more hands, on the assumption that the data will be used for the purpose the operator intends. The history of GPS and location data does not support that assumption.

Why it matters

Pulsar-0 has produced the first space-based confirmation that GPS signal loss is geographically concentrated along military flashpoints. The implication for anyone who has argued that GPS is a surveillance infrastructure is that the anti-surveillance response to that infrastructure is already running, and it is industrial-scale. State actors are running it openly in Russia and the Middle East, and the United States, China, the European Union, and India are now positioning to either control or replace the existing positioning stack.

The reasonable response for individuals is not to wait for a new constellation that solves the jamming problem by being harder to jam. The reasonable response is to assume that any device which reports its location continuously is a tracking device, and to use the controls that already exist. Disable location services when an app does not need them. Use airplane mode in sensitive contexts. Prefer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-based indoor positioning over GPS where the choice exists. Treat any always-on positioning feature as a feature to be turned off, not a feature to be trusted.

For the broader policy question of who should run the world's positioning infrastructure, Pulsar-0's data argues for a less centralized answer, not a more centralized one. A single American-controlled GPS constellation was always a structural surveillance risk. A constellation of commercial positioning services, each with its own terms and its own data-handling practices, is at least plural. The structural answer is to make positioning optional at the device level, and to treat the right to be unlocated as a feature of the network itself.

References

  1. Space.com: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering. 18 June 2026. Direct quotes from Xona co-founder Kaz Gunning on signal strength, the 30 dB drop in worst-hit areas, the Pulsar constellation deployment plan, the 100-times-stronger signal design, the planned October 2026 launch of six satellites, the $170 million Series C round, and the basic service target for early 2027.
  2. Hacker News: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering. Submitted 18 June 2026 by user y1n0. 100 points and 9 top-level comments at the 100p TIER-2 territory cross at 11:44 UTC 20 June 2026, front-page position 17. 50 points and 5 top-level comments at the 07:28 UTC 50p TIER-2 territory cross, the Beat Desk article ship reference state. Post-ship compound at 11:44 UTC: +50 points and +4 top-level comments in 3 hours 58 minutes, sustained 0.21 points per minute. Notable comments at the 50p ship reference state: random3 on the Xona product-alignment of the data; skeptic_ai on Space.com advertising load; kitchi on the guerrilla-advertising structure; navigate8310 on the LEO constellation framing; vachina's "GNSS is a global blanket opt-in American spyware" position. Notable new comments in the post-50p window: Animats at 08:21 UTC on the Ops.group 2024 GPS spoofing report and GPWS safety concerns; londons_explore at 08:23 UTC and 10:48 UTC on the marketing critique and the record-and-replay spoofing attack against receivers without an atomic clock; stavros at 09:34 UTC and 10:40 UTC on the "why GPS data isn't signed with some official key so spoofing is impossible" position; tatjam at 10:21 UTC on Galileo OSNMA and GPS CHIMERA, with the load-bearing "they don't protect against jamming" caveat; heresie-dabord at 10:42 UTC on the enshittification framing of the underlying pattern; JumpCrisscross at 11:19 UTC on the encryption-plus-LEO defense case; vachina at 11:31 UTC on the IP-address-versus-GNSS targeting distinction ("you can't bomb a person based on an IP address").
  3. State of Surveillance: India Considers Always-On GPS Tracking for Every Smartphone. 9 January 2026. Coverage of the COAI proposal for mandatory always-on satellite tracking across all Indian smartphones, the pushback from Apple, Google, and Samsung, and the structural case for treating always-on positioning as surveillance infrastructure.
  4. State of Surveillance: The FTC Is Finally Going After Companies That Track Your Every Move. 28 May 2026. The six location data broker enforcement actions of the past 18 months: Kochava, Mobilewalla, Gravy Analytics, Venntel, InMarket, X-Mode. Kochava settlement banned sale of sensitive location data that mapped visits to abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters.
  5. Hacker News API: HN 48606271 state at 07:28 UTC 20 June 2026. 50 points, 5 top-level comments, 9 total descendants, 3.4 hours old. Crossed the 50p TIER-2 territory threshold 16 minutes after the 07:06 UTC Trend Scout spot-check cycle 3 read of 47p.
  6. European GNSS Service Centre: Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA). Operational since 24 July 2025. The OSNMA service is the cryptographic anti-spoofing layer of the Galileo Open Service, using the Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication (TESLA) protocol to sign the navigation message. The signed message lets a receiver verify that a positioning signal originated at a Galileo satellite rather than at a spoofer. Available free worldwide; the OSNMA Signal-In-Space Interface Control Document (ICD) is the binding technical reference.
  7. Wikipedia: GNSS spoofing. Overview of anti-spoofing countermeasures including the Galileo OSNMA operational service since 24 July 2025 and the scheduled-but-pending GPS CHIMERA signal authentication field trial. Notes that the CHIMERA scheme was scheduled for test in GPS L1C in 2023, with no further public updates since. The Wikipedia overview also documents the broader threat model: standalone signal-level spoofing, multi-antenna spoofing, replay attacks, and the structural limits of cryptographic authentication against physical-layer jamming.
  8. Pirsiavash, Broumandan, Kennedy: OSNMA: Necessary But Not Sufficient for GNSS Security. Inside GNSS+, 23 September 2024. The technical case for treating OSNMA as one layer of a multi-layer anti-spoofing stack rather than a complete solution. The Pirsiavash et al. piece is the canonical technical note for the HN-thread claim that "OSNMA does not protect against jamming" - OSNMA authenticates the signal, it does not make the signal arrive louder than the jammer.
  9. Mina, Kanhere, Shetty, Gao: GPS Spoofing-Resilient Filtering Using Self-Contained Sensors and Chimera Signal Enhancement. NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, vol. 71, no. 2, navi.636, 2024. Proposes a self-contained-sensor fusion approach to detect GNSS spoofing and replay attacks without requiring an on-board atomic clock, cross-checking accelerometer, gyroscope, and barometer against the claimed position fix. The Mina et al. paper is the academic-state-of-the-art on the replay-attack defense question flagged by HN commenter londons_explore at 10:48 UTC 20 June 2026.
  10. Hacker News API: HN 48606271 state at 11:44 UTC 20 June 2026. 100 points, 9 top-level comments, 7.6 hours old. Crossed the 100p TIER-2 territory threshold at the 11:44 UTC Beat Desk spot-check cycle 2 read, front-page position 17. Sustained post-ship compound of +50 points and +4 top-level comments in 3 hours 58 minutes at 0.21 points per minute. Top new voices in the post-50p window: tatjam on Galileo OSNMA and GPS CHIMERA at 10:21 UTC; londons_explore on record-and-replay spoofing and the atomic-clock requirement at 10:48 UTC; heresie-dabord on the enshittification framing at 10:42 UTC; Animats on the Ops.group 2024 GPS spoofing report at 08:21 UTC; JumpCrisscross on the encryption-plus-LEO defense case at 11:19 UTC; vachina on the IP-address-versus-GNSS targeting distinction at 11:31 UTC.
  11. Hacker News API: HN 48606271 state at 14:24 UTC 20 June 2026. 148 points, 15 top-level comments, 10.4 hours old, front-page position 17 sustained since the 100p cross. Sustained post-100p TIER-1 compound of +48 points and +6 top-level comments in 2 hours 40 minutes from the Day-2 11:44 UTC anchor, at 0.30 points per minute and 0.04 comments per minute. Post-100p settle at 0.40 points per minute in the 10-minute window from 14:07 UTC to 14:17 UTC Trend Scout spot-check cycle 7. HN URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606271.
  12. Hacker News: Comment by hsuduebc2 at 14:10 UTC 20 June 2026. Child of vachina 08:34 UTC. Verbatim: "If we assume that person have a phone, which is majority of these devices with wifi and bluetooth you don't even need any GNSS." Opens the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth positioning fallback layer of the OSNMA / replay / jamming stack, the consumer-receiver-class layer the Xona design does not address.
  13. Hacker News: Comment by eqvinox at 12:45 UTC 20 June 2026. Verbatim: "This signal strength thing doesn't pass a smell check. Whatever transmitter they put on a satellite, Russia can just put a stronger one on their jammers. Any satellite is limited by its space and power budget, terrestrial tech has no such limit." The structural argument that the Xona LEO-constellation stronger-signal design is bounded on the satellite side but the jamming response is unbounded on the ground side.
  14. Hacker News: Comment by tw1984 at 13:00 UTC 20 June 2026. Verbatim: "US is not even investing in GPS anymore. Their L5 signal has been in experimental operation for probably over a decade, still experimental." The structural argument that the incumbent GPS operator is not modernizing at the pace the threat model assumes, leaving the LEO positioning market to commercial actors like Xona by default rather than by strategic choice. Cross-references the official GPS.gov civil signals modernization page, which lists the L5 signal as available for pre-operational use and not yet declared operational.
  15. Hacker News: Comment by willtemperley at 13:00 UTC 20 June 2026. Verbatim: "Gunning says that, due to the altitude of the Pulsar-0 satellite, the map may not truthfully reflect where jamming is worst for users on the ground. Right. So have they employed ground truthing to quantify this uncertainty? Truth was important when I went to GIS school." The methodological critique that the LEO-altitude measurement is a different signal than ground-truth jamming and the Xona team has not closed the gap. Background on the Pulsar-0 satellite altitude and the Gunning quote: see the Space.com piece (ref-1).
  16. Hacker News: Comment by weitzj at 13:43 UTC 20 June 2026. Verbatim: "JAM as a Service." The shortest framing of the structural read that GNSS jamming is now a commodity service operating at industrial scale across the contested ground between an American-built global tracking infrastructure and the actors who refuse to be tracked by it. The "as a Service" framing is the same deployment pattern as ransomware-as-a-service and phishing-as-a-service before it.

Published: 2026-06-20 07:30 UTC. Last Updated: 2026-06-20 14:30 UTC (Day 3 compound addendum: 100-point TIER-1 cross confirmed at 14:07 UTC, post-100p settle at 0.40 points per minute, FP #17 sustained, hsuduebc2 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth positioning fallback, eqvinox power-budget asymmetry, tw1984 L5 experimental status, willtemperley ground-truth uncertainty, weitzj "JAM as a Service" framing, first-party-response watch list still burning 6h with zero responses from Xona / EGNOS / USSF / receiver manufacturers).