What:
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-who-cares-about-the-baltic-jammer-terrestrial-navigation-in-the-baltic-sea-region
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/en/event/detail/who-cares-about-the-baltic-jammer-terrestrial-navigation-in-the-baltic-sea-region
Reports of GNSS interference in the Baltic Sea have become almost routine — airplanes losing GPS, ships drifting off course, and timing systems failing. But what happens when a group of engineers decides to build a navigation system that simply doesn’t care about the jammer? Since 2017, we’ve been developing **R-Mode**, a terrestrial navigation system that uses existing radio beacons and maritime infrastructure to provide independent positioning — no satellites needed. In this talk, we’ll share our journey from an obscure research project that “nobody needs” to a system now seen as crucial for resilience and sovereignty. Expect technical insights, field stories from ships in the Baltic, and reflections on what it means when a civilian backup system suddenly attracts military interest. Since 2017, our team at DLR and partners across Europe have been working on an alternative to satellite navigation: **R-Mode**, a backup system based on terrestrial transmitters. Our main testbed spans the Baltic Sea — a region now infamous for GNSS jamming and spoofing. We’ll start by showing what GNSS interference actually means in practice: aircraft losing navigation data, ships switching to manual control, and entire regions facing timing outages — such as the recent disruption of telecommunications in Gdańsk during Easter 2025. Then we’ll take you behind the scenes of building R-Mode: designing signals that can coexist with legacy systems, installing transmitters along the coast, and testing shipborne receivers in rough conditions. We’ll share personal moments — like the first time we received a stable position fix in the middle of the Baltic. Finally, we’ll talk about perception and politics: how a “research curiosity” became a critical infrastructure project, why ESA now wants to build a satellite backup (with the same vulnerabilities), and how it feels when your civilian open-source navigation system suddenly becomes strategically relevant. Lars, Niklas Hehenkamp, Markus
Where:
For remote, please go to https://w0tx.org/meet or https://meet.google.com/bsq-zrpv-jpj/, both links go to same place, for our live google meet to chat. Also streaming on https://youtube.com/denverradioclub.
When:
The pre-meeting Elmer session and meeting is scheduled for the third Wednesday of the month at the same time each month. This month 2/18/26, 1800-1845 (local U.S. Mountain Time) for the elmer session, then the Main Program is from 1900 to the end of the meeting.
The Last Elephant Cage
DEF CON 33 – Journey to the center of PSTN – I became a phone company. You should too – Enzo Damato
AMSAT OSCAR 7: The Little Satellite That Could
HOPE X (2014): Building an Open Source Cellular Network at Burning Man
Behind the Scenes at WWVH
HP Origins – Hewlett Packard Documentary
Jeri Ellsworth, AI6TK, Keynote speaker at Pacificon 2018
37C3 – Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains
38C3 – We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure
https://w0tx.org
https://w0tx.org/history
http://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio
https://w0tx.org/discord
https://groups.io/g/W0TX/
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