I'll easily believe "immune to Russian GPS jammers as typically deployed when used X kilometers behind active battles".
One could use a GNSS emulator and this modification to test how the system performs under various GPS fault conditions to quantify it. My hunch is that it's more of a regulatory check than an operational requirement. I suspect the signals from the Starlink satellites themselves are sufficient for the terminal to derive timing and position without having to rely on GPS at all.
Highly likely the GPS module inside the Starlink device has this ability. Whether or not that functionality is exposed is up to the Starlink engineers I suppose.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement
[2] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-fines-florida-driver-48k-ja...
[3] https://www.cnet.com/culture/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-acc...
[4] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-upholds-fine-jammer-used-bl...
[5] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-339560A1.pdf
Large airliners, for the most part, don't. They use inertial navigation. GPS is a source of calibration for their inertial navigation system. There are some (non-precision) approaches that use GPS.
On paper. In reality, most every antenna has "side lobes" through which jamming signals can spoil the actual signal. In some cases the more directional an antenna becomes, the more significant are the side lobes.
> Calculating position based on Starlink constellation requires more resources, and it’s not so fast. Plus, It can’t be used correctly in motion. Accumulated errors may be so significant that Starlink will not be able to work.
Since a single geostationary satellite has line of sight covering about 1/3 of the planets surface, I bet if they had a decent sized reactor onboard and a well thought out transmitter/antenna array, the ROI would look pretty good.
And I’m just some random punter.
No. That is not a thing. At most, one can make equipment less susceptible to jamming. Jamming is not like hacking, it isn't a matter of whether an attack works or does not. It cannot be fixed via a patch. Pump out enough energy close enough to the target and even a hyper-directional antenna can be jammed.
Have a look at military GPS jammers. They aren't the little dongles that you can buy online and run off USB battery packs.
The next gen replacement sounds like an absolute monster too, but without some of the donwsides like the need for a ram air turbine to power it.
For large power amplifiers, especially with power and power-density considerations, nothing beats a travelling wave tube.
And on the ground with "unlimited" power and cooling? Well, there's always the Klystron...
So you just lob in a heat seeker at the middle of the noise, and hope.
Then again, if you have an airborne source of jamming, you know you have bigger problems following. How much effort do you spend trying to knock out the jamming vs preparing for what is inevitably following? Flying in jammers from the opposite direction of an attack to draw in fighters to the wrong area is as elementary as attack options go.
No. Radio can turn around corners. It can also bounce off things. Radio is light, but at a much longer wavelength. It is less like blocking a laser and more akin to blocking out sound waves. Blocking line-of-sight to the transmitter would block the laser but would do little to block sound waves.
Pretend you're having a conversation. Now pretend you're having a conversation at a concert/club/any loud place. So like this[0]
> so in theory putting your receiver in a metal box with the top removed solves the problem?
You'd think so, but not actually. Think about it this way: you're trying to toss a ball into a cup (or box).
Is it easier or harder if that cup has a wide mouth or a narrow one? Make it V shaped for easier visualization and we'd be talking about the angle of that cone. Obviously the wider one right? The extreme other end of this is like a carnival ball tossing game where the cup is just as big (or they cheat and its smaller) than the ball you're trying to throw in. Now pretend you're trying to make that shot from a moving car. You come from far away and drive right past it and you get more points in this game the more shots you score.
That's analogous to what then satellite is doing. Remember it comes from over the horizon and then passes to the other horizon. You want to maximize your viewing angle because that gives the satellites more chances to make contact. This is more complicated because you need to kinda do this in parallel as you're handing off data collection to the next satellite coming through so the better viewing angle the more chances you have to smoothly negotiate that pass over.
Then there's the whole issue that we're talking about waves instead of particles but I'll let someone else handle that. You can actually find some cool visualizations on the internet about these. See knife edge diffraction.
Also, the more directional you get, the more it may be possible to determine where you are.
