Jamming Spoofing & Spamming - A Tale of GPS Skullduggery

The speaker, a longtime Long Beach harbor pilot, opens by explaining why modern ship handling depends on GPS. Pilot displays overlay live position on electronic charts, along with ship history and projected track. Those displays rely on five inputs: position, heading, rate of turn, course over ground and speed over ground. A bad value in any of them, whether from multipath or interference, leaves the pilot working from wrong information.

He then covers how easy jamming is. Cheap consumer jammers are sold online and are used by some truck drivers to hide from fleet tracking. A sensor placed near container terminals logged frequent but weak jamming events. More capable direction-finding units can tell jamming from spoofing, report signal strength and estimate the bearing to a source. Two such units helped the terminal operators map a jammer's likely location to a nearby road.

The central case is a one-hour disruption on January 29, 2026. At least seven ships, NOAA reference stations and aircraft near the Channel Islands reported GPS anomalies, spoofing or total loss of fix. Public monitoring data pointed to a Navy activity at Point Mugu, which had issued aircraft notices but no ship warnings. The speaker closes by pointing to a recent white paper by Todd Humphreys on Russian GNSS jamming across Europe. His takeaway is that mariners and other position, navigation and timing users should practice operating without GNSS.