Positioning The smartwatch locates the Kainuu skier’s run more than 500 kilometers to Ladoga – Can GPS interference detected by airplanes also appear on fitness equipment?

Finland in the last few days, significant disturbances in gps positioning have been observed at the eastern border, which have affected air traffic.

On Tuesday, many aircraft reported similar problems on the Mikkeli – Jyväskylä – Kuopio axis. The Lithuanian Transavibaltika plane has not been able to fly from Tallinn to Savonlinna for three days due to landing problems.

Read more: “Exceptional amount” of GPS interference detected at Finland’s eastern border, Traficom warns of air traffic

Also from Kajaani Teija Larikka has encountered problems with its sports watch using GPS location.

Last Thursday Larikka did an hour-long ski run in Pöllyvaara, Kajaani. After the run, he returned to his car, glanced at his sports watch from the Polar brand, and was amazed: the watch showed a ten-kilometer distance of 186 kilometers. In addition, the watch showed that Larikka had skied on the ice of Ladoga in Russia, 500 kilometers away, instead of in Kainuu.

“I laughed to myself that there was a long loop. When I came home and went to the smartwatch app, I was wondering how the app looks like I’ve skied in Ladoga, ”Larikka says.

Larikka told about his experience on Twitter, where a couple of other fitness enthusiasts told him they had experienced GPS problems in recent days in Eastern Finland. Although Larikka described her experience with a sense of humor, she says she also considered whether the case could be related to the current world political situation.

Larikka says she uses a sports watch regularly. He has never experienced a similar throw in the device’s gps measurement. Even after Thursday’s run, the smartwatch has already measured the distance normally.

“Positioning can sometimes throw a few hundred meters, but the fact that it throws the location somewhere else doesn’t have that kind of experience.”

Polar was notified on Tuesday that another Polar customer had reported similar problems. However, Polar has no information on the causes of the disruption, but is the marketing manager Justin Chacona signaled that the company would continue to monitor the situation.

The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom has said that it does not know the source of the disturbance. Traficom has not commented on whether this could be intentional harassment from Russia, for example.

Smartwatches consumer devices use the same gps signals as aircraft positioning systems, says Aalto University’s assistant professor of geoinformatics Maaria Nordman.

“Technically, it sounds possible that if there have been any inconveniences on the plane, smartwatches and the like could also be disrupted,” says Nordman.

Director of the Spatial Data Center of the National Land Survey, Professor Sanna Kaasalainen on the other hand, it is more doubtful that the disturbances observed by fitness enthusiasts are due to the same disturbance observed in air traffic.

If it were an interference signal, it would probably be transmitted from the ground, in which case it would not necessarily hit terrestrial receivers, but mainly high-altitude receivers such as airplanes. The signal transmitted from the surface of the earth no longer strikes the receivers on the surface of the earth at a certain distance, because the earth is curved.

“If you want to interfere with both ground and air receivers at the same time, you need to send the signal on a large scale with several different devices in different directions,” says Kaasalainen.

In public Based on the information available, Nordman considers that the case could involve so-called jamming of satellite navigation systems.

Interference refers to an intentional radio transmission that masks a weak time and location information signal transmitted by a satellite.

Similar harassment was observed in northern Finland in late 2018. At that time, Northern Finland was subjected to interference with the satellite positioning system in northern Finland during NATO military exercises.

Kaasalainen recalls that all kinds of positioning problems are quite common in consumer devices.

“Most of them are due to something other than harassment. [Maapallon kaasukehän] ionospheric activity, software failure or that the orbital data of the satellites have not been updated, ”says Kaasalainen.

Terrain features can also prevent the signal from the satellite from reaching the consumer’s receiver. For example, in a high forest forest or in an urban environment, tall buildings can interfere with signal formation.

The National Land Survey maintains the development of satellite signal quality control GNSS Finland service, which shows the real-time status of satellite positioning systems, such as signal strength at ground stations. Kaasalainen says that the National Land Survey has visited the data generated by the stations in recent days, and no large-scale interference in the entire area has been detected in the satellite signals.