Jammertest pumps up the jam in Norway

Every September, for one week, the airwaves above the Arctic island of Andøya, Norway become some of the most heavily attacked in the world — deliberately so. From the small village of Bleik at 69 degrees north, Norwegian authorities launch hundreds of jamming and spoofing attacks during Jammertest, letting participants test their technologies against realistic threats, identify weaknesses and ultimately develop stronger positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions.

The event matters because satellite navigation is trusted far beyond everyday map apps. Three main types of intentional interference are exercised: jamming, where a powerful signal floods a receiver and drowns out the real satellite signal so no position can be calculated and the blue dot turns grey and disappears; spoofing, where false signals trick the receiver into calculating an incorrect location so the blue dot remains but sits in the wrong place; and meaconing, where signals from real satellites are captured and rebroadcast to a nearby location, making the receiver's time or place wrong.

At Jammertest, simple receivers are constantly fooled: a maps app's blue dot vanishes and reappears in the middle of a lake or out at sea, a sports app tracks endless circles at impossible walking speeds, and smart watches even appear to travel in time. But the stakes go well beyond finding a bus stop or monitoring marathon training — the same technology underpins critical civilian and governmental infrastructure including aviation, financial systems, power grids and emergency assistance, where losing a reliable signal has consequences far beyond a misplaced blue dot.

The European Space Agency has been a regular participant since 2023 and, as architect of Europe's satellite navigation systems, continuously works on strengthening their resilience. "Jammertest has become a fundamental complement to our testing activities at ESTEC and in the field. It allows us to take a version of our lab on wheels and test innovations in a real-world environment, under conditions that are impossible to fully replicate in testing facilities," said Jörg Hahn, ESA's Galileo Head of Engineering.

This year ESA brought its largest testing portfolio yet, with the team busy testing technologies for a range of ESA navigation programmes, from new encrypted signals to sophisticated antennas. The headline result: Galileo achieved its first civil authenticated position fix with the Signal Authentication Service, tested in Norway.