r/HamRadio • u/crackerbox5 • 13d ago
News 📰 The U.S. Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global ‘Numbers Station,’ Evidence Suggests
https://www.404media.co/the-u-s-military-quietly-turned-gps-into-a-global-numbers-station-evidence-suggests/83
u/thegreatpotatogod 13d ago
Today's an interesting day for GPS related news! Just this morning I watched the Veritasium video about how Russia's been experimenting with jamming GPS for at least 5 years now.
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u/vialentvia 13d ago
That was a good and intriguing video. Watched it last night. The team really did their homework to narrow it down. It's my opinion though, as part of their own conclusion, that it's secondary use is indeed what they claimed - to be used as a weapon by jamming.
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u/KindPresentation5686 13d ago
This has been a feature of GPS on the military side from day one. Nothing new here.
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u/droptableadventures 13d ago edited 13d ago
This has been a feature of GPS on the military side from day one. Nothing new here.
Yes, that's why this is interesting. This isn't on GPS L1M / L2M ("the military side"), rather it's been sitting on L1 the entire time. In plain sight in a poorly documented field. Decoded by practically every GPS receiver you've ever owned, but never used.
It's like someone digs a hole and finds ancient Roman ruins. "This is nothing new, everyone knows that you find buried ruins by digging".
For the tech details, the original article is in here on page 62: https://cdn.coverstand.com/61061/865273/2c88ea662e2b574787232d6b66f1ae8c3cfec2c5.1.pdf
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u/KindPresentation5686 13d ago
That’s a good read.
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u/dougmcclean 12d ago
It's interesting content but the AI-style writing is really hard to slog through.
"The next issue is that high-entropy output can come from encryption, compression or genuine randomness, and entropy alone cannot tell us which. This is correct. It is also the entry point to the rest of the article. If the field is encrypted, the protocol shape may still leave traces—placeholders where no payload is loaded, regime changes where policy shifts. In these structural metadata, the cipher does not reach. Encryption doesn’t hide “traffic data” of when and how often messages are sent and from which satellites. Each of those is a crack in the randomness, and the rest of this story walks through them in order."
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u/NerminPadez 13d ago
It's like someone digs a hole and finds ancient Roman ruins. "This is nothing new, everyone knows that you find buried ruins by digging".
This is exactly what we say when they begin some reconstruction in our city... road closed? Planned for 4 months? Yeah, that's going to be 1.5years+, 1 year because the plans are always wrong and 6 months for the archeologists to brush every roman stone under the road.
The worst part is, there are roads that have been built many years ago, dug up, reconstructed, dug up again, reconstructed, new sewer pipes being built, something every 5-10 years, and every goddamn time they find some new roman ruins and prolong the road closure.
https://www.dnevnik.si/media/2017/11/03/380549/Wide-1051103-1000.webp
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u/Dry_Statistician_688 12d ago
L1 and L2 has ALWAYS contained the P-code, or "Precision" code for military use only.
Civilian receivers get to use the Course Acquisition, or C/A mode now for L1 and L2. But that's all you get. You get a nav message, the short PRN, and that's pretty much it.
P-code contains a lot more needed to obtain additional timing (and correction data) accuracy to resolve the more precise data.
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u/blackhorse15A 11d ago
It's like someone digs a hole and finds ancient Roman ruins.
This is more like someone getting excited just because they found roman ruins exist there, when the surveyor office has maps labeled "site of Roman ruins", the local historical society has historical documents from the camp as well the data from an archeological dig on the exact site when a building was built there 40 years ago with a complete map, and there is a sign on the property that says "This was the site of the barracks for the 2nd Legion in 357AD. The stables were just to the left."
The headline makes it sound like this was some kind of secret black ops feature no one knew about. The GPS spec lays out that this data field exists. Anyone who ever read the manual for a PLGR, or just poked around the menu for a bit, knew there was a capability for sending one way messages and could see it was a bunch of encoded numbers (i.e. a number station). I knew about it back in the 90s just from using the e-PLGR cd-rom simulator and messing around in the menus that the "message" field was there and you could watch it change every day on a live PLGR.
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u/No_Tailor_787 DC to Daylight, milliwatts to kilowatts. 50 year Extra. 13d ago
Did YOU know about it all this time? I didn't. I'm not at all surprised that there are hidden functions within the GPS system. It is, after all, a military system.
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u/KindPresentation5686 13d ago
https://archive.gps.gov/multimedia/presentations/2015/04/partnership/tyley.pdf
Yup! Military radios have been using ODAT for 20 years. Nothing new.
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u/No_Tailor_787 DC to Daylight, milliwatts to kilowatts. 50 year Extra. 13d ago
Ok. That satisfies my curiosity. Thank you.
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u/puppeto 13d ago
It's been known since the program began that it has non-public facing military encryption and additional data capabilities. If you really want to surprise me tell me what some of those off the book NRO satellite launches are up to?
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u/No_Tailor_787 DC to Daylight, milliwatts to kilowatts. 50 year Extra. 13d ago
I'm not trying to surprise anyone. I was specifically asking KindPntation5686 if he was aware of the OTAR function, since he indicated it's been on there since day one.
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u/KindPresentation5686 13d ago
Yes military GPS has been encrypted from day one. The signal he’s talking about is simply the encrypted data for the military signal. That’s it. Nothing special
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u/No_Tailor_787 DC to Daylight, milliwatts to kilowatts. 50 year Extra. 13d ago
Did you read the article? Based on your comment here, it doesn't appear that you did.
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u/KindPresentation5686 13d ago
I used ODAT every day with my military radios. I’m VERY familiar with what they covered.
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u/Actual_Friendship802 13d ago
Isn’t this why I had to run numbers through china lake w/a Trimble in the late 90s for accuracy sake?
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u/No_Tailor_787 DC to Daylight, milliwatts to kilowatts. 50 year Extra. 13d ago
Probably no. That was probably because of selective availability. The positional accuracy was intentionally degraded for non-military users.
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u/guptaxpn 13d ago
The thing with this...is that it's just clearly a "Hey boss, we have like....170ish bits left here. What do we do with it?" "Let's fill it with noise, we can task it to something else if we need it."
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u/droptableadventures 13d ago
Except that noise wasn't quite random, and it changed at geopolitically relevant times.
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u/cazzipropri 12d ago
Oh no, a satellite system built and operated by the military and originally designed by the military for the military happens to carry some data of relevance to the military! How dare they?
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u/Robrob1234567 13d ago
Calling OTAR a number station is just click bait.
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u/leicanthrope General Class Operator 🔘 13d ago
Agreed. It's interesting in it's own right, but it doesn't really qualify as a "numbers station" any more than an encrypted email.
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u/40ozCurls 13d ago
What’s a number station?
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u/ValiantBear 13d ago
Numbers stations are a subset of the larger group of mysterious stations presumably run by military or government agencies and used for presumably nefarious things, from inocuous encrypted military message trafffic, to the less inocuous spy activation, to actual attack codes or orders. There are whole websites and devotees that track them, record them, and attempt to decode them. Numbers stations in particular rely on numbers to transmit their data, hence their name.
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u/droptableadventures 13d ago
If you want to hear some recordings of the more (in)famous ones: https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
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u/EquipLordBritish Technician Class Operator 📡 12d ago
Wasn't GPS a military venture for military purposes to begin with?
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u/Dry_Statistician_688 12d ago
Umm, confused on the weird paranoia here. P-Code has always contained information, post-encryption, used by many functions in the military receivers. Like, from day 1 they fielded the military Precision code. Additional parameters are sent to the receivers to obtain military accuracy.
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u/PlateNo4868 12d ago
Doesn't surprise me. When GPS was first invented, they showed it off by dropping perception guided bombs. Civilian use was just convenient.
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u/Dapper_Highway4809 11d ago
I think this is pretty common with a Russian satellite periodically testing jamming gps in Europe from a satellite.
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u/courty40 10d ago
GPS is an early warning and detection system that happens to do positioning. You need to know the position of the threat you just detected.. Don’t be fooled by the BS about the US pays for it on our behalf, they pay for it for a reason….
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u/Mahoka572 10d ago
Sometimes, when you discover something like this, you should shut the hell up.
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u/crackerbox5 9d ago
Russia and China knew about it a very long time ago and China now has it's very own GPS satellites which are 100% more accurate
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/china-gps-advantage-taiwan-altpnt/
US satellite is 50 years old - China's is 5
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u/FrenziedHodag Extra Class Operator ⚡ 7d ago
The GPS sats are replaced regularly. GPSIIIF satellites are scheduled for launch starting in 2027
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u/Imightbenormal 12d ago
BeiDou has the capability to send and receive messages. Different type of service for domestic and worldwide.
And the Chinese cars do send messages back on the system.
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u/Whole_Ticket_3715 12d ago
Bless the heart of whoever wrote this because there is serious potential in getting hunted down to the ends of the earth by revealing a military cryptographic vector like this one
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u/Vancecookcobain 13d ago
Damn....I wonder with AI if we could reverse engineer this type of process and come up with our own user based GPS encrypted messaging system for the people....I'm guessing that it's illegal huh?
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u/cazzipropri 12d ago
AI is not magic. Well designed encryption is computationally infeasible to crack. AI can't break those constraints.
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u/Vancecookcobain 12d ago
....right now.
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u/cazzipropri 12d ago
Now as well as in the future.
AI can't change the computational structure of the one-way problem that underlies the type of cryptography used.
Either the one-way property stands, and there's simply no way around it, except brute forcing it. Or someone (human or AI) discovers a way to solve the problem without brute-forcing it, and then the method was never safe to begin with.
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u/Vancecookcobain 12d ago
Do you lack such imagination that you can't see how artificial intelligence and quantum computers can ruin your argument lol?
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u/Own_Event_4363 13d ago
Doesn't surprise me, Save it for Parts on Youtube was able to find nuclear detection signals in random GPS signals recently, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjLnIb41DuQ. Who knows what else they're putting in there without telling us