Jamming and spoofing affects ship navigation and dynamic positioning (DP), and can lead to accidents and damage
Geopolitical tensions and malicious acts have increased the frequency and geographic spread of jamming and spoofing signals from the Global Navigational Satellite System (GNSS) to ships.
Jamming can prevent signals from GNSS, such as US-backed GPS and European Union’s Galileo, from being transmitted to ships, while spoofing can fool onboard electronics into thinking a vessel is positioned elsewhere.
Hexagon technical sales manager Edward Milne spoke to Riviera about variations in jamming and spoofing, and solutions to mitigate their impact during the Annual Offshore Support Journal Conference.
Jamming can be a continuous amplitude of signal or work on just one frequency, and can be wideband affecting multiple vessels using the whole GNSS spectrum, he explained.
These GNSS attacks are prevalent in the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea and have occurred in the Baltic Sea and Red Sea.
Jamming a ship’s GNSS could result in a navigational incident, while lost positioning of an offshore support vessel could lead to a fatal accident, says Mr Milne.
The main mitigation technology to prevent onboard electronics from being impacted is an anti-jamming antenna. “This is the only thing that can protect against jamming as you cannot filter out the jamming signal,” said Mr Milne.
“The anti-jamming antenna nulls out the jamming signal, but allows the rest of the GNSS signals from all the other directions to be received.”
This antenna can mitigate spoofing if this signal is at a higher power than the actual GNSS signal. Otherwise, it would be down to the GNSS receiver technology to recognise the spoof.
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