According to Veritasium, in September 2025, researchers asked for help from the broader community at the Institute of Navigation conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Months later, Humphreys received a vital tip about raw interference signal data captured by stations in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Trondheim, Norway during an interference event on February 11, 2026.
By examining the difference in time when that signal arrived at two different stations, Humphreys and Clements calculated a “quasi-hyperboloid surface” – the term they used in the paper – extending thousands of kilometers into space where the interfering satellite would have been located. As explained by Veritasium, the margin of error represented by the thickness of that surface was only five meters.
Comparison of suspected satellite orbits with the quasi-hyperboloid surface showed that the orbit of only one satellite is perfectly aligned – the Russian satellite Kosmos 2546. That discovery, in turn, pointed them to six satellites in the Russian Adeniya Kosmicheskaya Sistema (EKS) constellation, including Kosmos 2546, which are designed to provide early warning if a ballistic missile launch is detected.
Such satellites sit in highly elliptical Molniya orbits extending well above Earth’s high latitudes, providing long-term coverage of the Northern Hemisphere. Humphreys, Clements, and Krizis’ analysis showed that there was at least one such Russian satellite above the horizon for each reference ground station during all GPS interference events.
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The question still remains open as to why Russian satellites appear to periodically engage in short bursts of GPS interference targeted at Europe – particularly because the jamming signal is slightly offset from the normal GPS frequency band.
In the Veritasium video, Humphreys speculated that the GPS interference capabilities of Russian satellites may have been tested only briefly on a neighboring frequency adjacent to a specific GPS band. “And then eventually in the future when there’s a heated conflict, they go ahead and tune their transmitter to the GPS band, but now it’s much more damaging because it’s located directly on that band,” he said.
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