Why GNSS is not enough

Nearly everything that finds a position, gives directions or keeps precise time today runs on GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou. The dependency does not stop at vehicle navigation: emergency crews, public fleets, telephone networks, the electrical grid and freight all hang on the same four systems.

All four are in the hands of foreign states, and all four have the same weak spot: the signal from a satellite is faint by the time it reaches the ground.

Where it breaks

The signal is lost in tunnels, indoors and between tall buildings.
The signal is weak, so it is easy to drown out, and the equipment for doing it keeps spreading.
A fake signal makes the receiver work out a wrong position. The receiver then shows that position as though it were right, and with high confidence. That is what makes it dangerous.
Critical services depend on a single family of technology.
In a crisis the authority over the system does not sit in Turkey.

What has already happened

United States, May 2026. An air ambulance out of Roswell flew into military GPS jamming and hit a mountain short of Ruidoso. Report on the NTSB finding
The Baltic, April 2024. Finnair had to stop flying to Tartu altogether for a month. Two airliners lost the signal on approach and turned back to Helsinki without landing; the flights stayed suspended for weeks because the airport's only approach system was GPS based. Anadolu Agency
Norway, 2019 onwards. Steady jamming from the Kola Peninsula has repeatedly blinded police, ambulance and rescue navigation in Finnmark. During one snowstorm a missing person's emergency beacon failed and the rescue helicopters flew blind. The Barents Observer
The Black Sea, 2017. Russian electronic warfare units altered the GNSS signals and receivers on more than twenty commercial ships reported a wrong position at the same time: at sea, their screens put them at an airport 40 km inland. GalileoGNSS

When it happened

The four events above, in time. None of them is a historical curiosity: the oldest is 2017, the newest is this year, and the gaps between them are closing.

What YERKON answers

For the rural unit, 8 to 10 km is a communications and coverage target; how accurately it can measure distance at that range is to be confirmed by field trials. If it holds, a low flying aircraft can hear the unit too. Units around an airport could leave a separate network that keeps working on the ground even with the satellites silenced. These are the report's targets, and this repository measured none of them in the field.

Against a fake signal YERKON is more than a standby: it is a cross-check. A vehicle or a ship can compare the satellite's position with the one from the ground and so detect that it is under a spoofing attack.