Poland lost GPS on 63% of days this month
2026-08-25 · EA5IYR
Poland's National Institute of Telecommunications has been logging something that no longer reads like interference and starts to read like weather.
In the first nineteen days of August 2026, all GNSS bands were fully disrupted on 63% of days. Across May and June it was around 70%, with only ten to thirteen per cent of days clean. In Pomerania alone, July produced close to ninety hours of disruption.
The Institute's position is careful and unambiguous about one thing: the source is "external and linked to the activity of electronic warfare systems in the Baltic Sea region." Researchers at Gdańsk University of Technology and the Maritime University of Gdynia put the main sources of interference and falsification in the Kaliningrad region.
Lithuania has reported the spoofing infrastructure there growing from a handful of antennas at the start of 2025 to several dozen, with a reach of roughly 450 kilometres — which covers Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Belarus and the sea itself. Two different attacks
These get used interchangeably in reporting, and they should not be.
Jamming is noise. Shout loudly enough on the frequency and the receiver cannot pick the satellites out of it. The receiver loses lock, reports no position, and — this is the important part — the crew knows something is wrong.
Spoofing transmits a counterfeit constellation, stronger than the real one, computing to a position the attacker chooses. The receiver locks on happily and displays a confident, wrong answer. Nothing on the panel indicates a problem.
A jammed ship knows it is lost. A spoofed ship sails the wrong way believing it is on course. That asymmetry is the whole story. What it has already touched
On 21 August 2026 the Polish minehunter ORP Albatros was jammed during Baltic operations, confirmed by NATO's Joint Force Command Brunssum. In September 2025 the Spanish defence minister's aircraft picked up interference near Kaliningrad, and the European Commission president's aircraft was disrupted approaching Bulgaria.
Around 40% of European air traffic is now affected by GNSS interference to some degree.
Aviation has fallbacks — inertial systems, ground-based navigation aids, and crews trained for exactly this. Small vessels, drones and ordinary phones do not. Why this belongs on a radio site
Because it is the same argument, in a different band.
Satellite navigation is a very weak signal arriving from 20,000 kilometres away. Overpowering it locally is almost trivial, which is why a truck-sized emitter can deny an area the size of a country. Every system built on assumed GNSS availability inherited that fragility quietly.
The old answers are getting attention again for the same reason shortwave did: they are hard to switch off from somewhere else. Poland is building an ASG-EUPOS monitoring portal, the Polish Space Agency is planning a sensor network, and NATO has stepped up counter-jamming. Meanwhile the practical advice being handed to sailors and pilots is almost quaint — carry offline charts, know traditional navigation, do not trust a single source for position.
That is not nostalgia. It is what resilience looks like when the convenient system is contested.
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Sources: Euronews, ERR, Defense News, NATO JFC Brunssum.