Has the civilian Beidou system been jammed? Chinese crew members said all systems have failed, and they can only rely on traditional methods to navigate!
As the US increases its strikes against Iranian targets, a Chinese crew member on a cargo ship revealed in a video that the navigation system in their area has completely "collapsed," and even the civilian Beidou signal, which is usually known for its stability, has been severely disrupted. Electronic nautical charts went black, GPS positioning drifted, and modern cargo ships that once relied on high technology were suddenly forced back to the "primitive era" of using compasses, sextants, and old nautical charts to calculate coordinates. The crew member helplessly said, "It's really hard, I just want to get home as soon as possible."
The Persian Gulf, a global energy artery, has become a real "powder keg." In modern hybrid warfare, electronic warfare is often the first wave of attacks. To cover military operations, interfere with enemy-guided weapons, or protect their own fleet, warring parties typically implement large-scale radio frequency interference and deception.
Previously, such interference mainly targeted military frequency bands or was limited to specific battlefield areas. But this time, the situation clearly exceeded the norm. The narrow waters of the Persian Gulf are densely packed with merchant ships, and the intense electromagnetic suppression is like throwing an "electromagnetic bomb" into a crowded market, indiscriminately covering multiple civilian navigation frequency bands including L1 and L2.
According to multiple shipping reports and descriptions from crew members, this failure is not a problem with a single system. Usually, ships receive signals from GPS, Beidou, GLONASS, and Europe's Galileo simultaneously, using multi-system redundancy to ensure safety. However, the on-site footage shows that "all systems have failed."
Dao Ge believes that this indicates the jamming source has extremely high power and may have used wideband noise jamming technology, directly overwhelming the weak satellite signals coming from space. The electronic nautical chart display system could not obtain accurate ship position data, either locking up and reporting errors or displaying completely wrong positions—some ships were even "drifted" dozens of kilometers onto land.
Beidou has indeed made many anti-jamming optimizations in its signal structure and encoding, but these mainly focus on defense at the receiver level and signal processing level. When the jamming source is near the surface and the power intensity far exceeds the strength of the satellite signals reaching the ground, the satellite signals arriving at the ground are already very weak, equivalent to the brightness of a 25-watt light bulb from 20,000 kilometers away. At this point, any civilian receiver would face a problem of low signal-to-noise ratio.
This is similar to being able to hear whispers from afar (satellite signals) in a quiet room, but if someone starts a rock concert right next to your ear (strong interference), no matter how sensitive your ears are (no matter how good the receiver performance is), you won't be able to hear the whispers. Dao Ge judges that the jamming source is likely deployed along the shore or on a ship, very close to the cargo ship, creating a local "signal black hole." In addition, the open nature of civilian frequency bands makes them more vulnerable to wideband interference, which is a common physical weakness of global satellite navigation systems (GNSS).
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1858691397550080/
Disclaimer: This article represents the views of the author.