According to Veritasium, in September 2025, researchers asked for help from the wider community at the Institute of Navigation conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Months later, Humphreys received breakthrough information on raw jamming signal data captured by stations in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Trondheim, Norway, during a jamming incident on February 11, 2026.
By examining the difference in the arrival time of this signal at two different stations, Humphreys and Clements calculated a “quasi-hyperboloid surface”—the term they use in the paper—that extends tens of thousands of kilometers into space where the interfering satellite is located. As explained by Veritasium, the margin of error represented by the thickness of this surface was only five meters.
A comparison of suspected satellite orbits with a quasiperboloid surface showed that only one satellite’s orbit was perfectly aligned – the Russian satellite Cosmos 2546. This discovery, in turn, showed them six satellites in Russian Edina Kosmicheskaya Sistema (EKS) constellation, including Cosmos 2546, is designed to provide early warning when detected ballistic missiles are launched.
Such satellites sit in highly elliptical orbits Molnia orbits It extends far above Earth’s high latitudes, providing long-term coverage of the Northern Hemisphere. Analysis by Humphreys, Clements, and Krizise showed that during all GPS interference events, there was at least one such Russian satellite well above the horizon for each reference ground station.
Why bother?
There is still an open question as to why Russian satellites periodically engage in short-term targeted GPS interference over Europe, especially when the jamming signal is slightly outside the usual GPS frequency range.
In the Veritasium video, Humphreys speculated that the Russians may have tested the satellites’ GPS jamming capabilities for only a short period of time on a neighboring frequency adjacent to the typical GPS range. “And then when there’s a hot conflict in the future, they go ahead and tune their transmitters into the GPS band, but now it’s more harmful because it’s in that band,” he said.
