GPS signals are being jammed and spoofed all over the globe in a sudden uptick of this once rare activity. What can be done about it?

In the inaugural episode of Tech Talks, Aerospace's Kevin Bell talks with John Janeski, who leads one of several teams looking at this increasingly common danger.

"We've seen a massive increase in the number of jamming and spoofing events worldwide," Janeski said; it used to be a few thousand per year, now it's tens of thousands a month. "It's gotten so bad in certain regions of the world airlines can no longer use GPS for navigation while landing at certain airports."

Aerospace tracks pervasive and emerging jamming efforts around the world, he explained, allowing operators to know when they're in a particularly risky area.

"Yeah, I've actually heard they've managed to pull in lots of proliferated LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite GPS receiver signals to determine globally in real time where all that jamming energy is. So once I know where the jamming is, i still can't navigate, so is there something I can do on my antenna side to help mitigate these issues?

"The first line of defense is your antenna, which, if it has multiple elements, it can null jamming power in certain directions," said Janeski. "The next line of defense is signal processing, so you can remove jammers and interference using special signal processing techniques. And then, if all else fails on GPS, then you switch to other types of PNT (position, navigation, and timing) sensors and sources that are not being affected by the local threats."

There's plenty more to the discussion, so watch the full (yet still short) episode above or on YouTube here. And keep an eye out here or on our social channels for more Tech Talks!