Russia’s 14Ts227 Tobol global navigation satellite system position, navigation and timing electronic attack apparatus falls under the spotlight of this month’s Beating the System column.
Electronic Warfare (EW) systems seldom achieve the dubious distinction of public notoriety, but this is a sobriquet applicable to Russia’s 14Ts227 Tobol fixed Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) jamming and spoofing equipment. The 14Ts227 first came to light in the public domain in November 2020 via an article in The Space Review by Bart Hendrikx entitled ‘Russia gears up for electronic warfare in space (part two)’. Mr. Hendrikx noted in the article that up to five 14Ts227 sites may have been constructed across Russia and in the country’s Kaliningrad exclave. The author continues that work may have commenced on the system back in 2012, possibly even earlier. He continues that “(n)one of the publicly accessible documents (relating to the 14Ts227) reveal anything about the exact purpose of Tobol. However, the fact that the infrastructure is co-located with satellite tracking facilities would indicate that it is aimed at protecting Russian satellites from electronic attack rather than launching electronic attacks against foreign satellites”.
Mr. Hendrikx explored the possibility that the 14Ts227 did have a relationship with GNSS constellations, specifically Russia’s GLONASS constellation, possibly to protect the latter against narrowband jamming. In 2023, an article in The Washington Post by Alex Horton referred to a leaked, classified United States intelligence report saying that the system had been employed for the attempted jamming of SpaceX Starlink Satellite Communications (SATCOM) terminals used by Ukrainian forces during that country’s ongoing war with Russia. A Starlink terminal must ascertain its position on Earth before it can communicate with the satellites overhead as they move across the sky. GNSS PNT signals provide a convenient and easy way to perform this function hence the disruption that 14Ts227 electronic attack could cause for Starlink terminals within range.
In May 2024, a report by Intelligence Online entitled ‘Russian GPS jammer Tobol worries Western forces in Baltic area’ added to claims that the 14Ts227 was causing not inconsiderable GNSS PNT disruption in the Baltic. Additional claims surfaced that same month when GNSS PNT disruption, believed to have been caused by the 14Ts227, was blamed for adversely affecting Finnair flights operating from Tartu Airport in southern Estonia. At the time, Tartu Airport’s runway approach and departure procedures relied heavily on aircrew GNSS PNT use.
Threats
It is arguably not surprising that Russian radio frequency engineers, and the country’s military, were keen to develop counter-GNSS PNT weapons. Operation Desert Storm waged in 1991 by a US-led coalition to expel Iraqi occupiers from Kuwait saw the first use of GNSS PNT in combat. The system helped guide United States land force manoeuvre units as they attacked Iraqi forces in the Arabian Desert. GNSS PNT use, most notably of the US Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation, increased throughout the 1990s with the advent of satellite-guided weapons. The most famous of these being Boeing’s GBU-31 and GBU-36/B Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits which equip dumb ordnance. JDAM guidance kits increase unguided munition accuracy to between 4.8 metres/m (16 feet/ft) and 13m (43ft) circular error probable.
Such is the enviable precision of weapons like JDAM that they have been used with increasing frequency during US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) led combat operations. During Operation Allied Force, the NATO effort to expel Serbian army and Special Police units from the Balkan region of Kosovo where they were attempting to ethnically cleanse the local Muslim population, was a case in point. Open sources note that up to 35 percent of all air-delivered ordnance comprised Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs), including those relying on GNSS PNT signals. Operation Inherent Resolve, a multinational undertaking directed against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, saw over 90 percent of air-delivered ordnance comprising PGMs. Alongside GNSS PNT-guided munitions, the Russian military is very concerned about intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance gathering, and deliberate attack, by Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). UAVs often require GNSS position, navigation and timing signals to find their way.
Russia’s preoccupation with satellite-guided munitions and UAVs has manifested itself in the deployment of numerous tactical- and operational-level GNSS PNT jamming and spoofing systems. Several of these are chronicled in this article. As a fixed system seemingly designed to protect targets inside Russia from UAV and PGM threats, it would be fair to argue that the 14Ts227 Tobol is a strategic-level system.
Concept of operations
Comparatively little information exists in the public domain concerning the 14Ts227 Tobol, its design and configuration. It is thought that the system is fixed and employs several dish antennas that presumably can be steered in a single, or several, directions to provide jamming and/or spoofing beams. These beams could be steered in the direction of confirmed incoming threats like UAVs or GNSS PNT-guided ordnance. Alternatively, the dishes, and the beams, could be moved towards the direction/s from where threats are expected to arrive from.
Armada has used EOS Applications’ Theosight open-source intelligence analysis tool to learn more about the 14Ts227. Theosight determines that each 14Ts227 comprises several parabolic dishes with diameters of two metres (6.6ft), 7.3m (24ft) and nine metres (29.5ft). It is possible that the two-metre dishes are used to jam GNSS receivers equipping incoming threats to prevent them receiving downlinked PNT signal transmitted from GNSS constellation satellites. The 7.3m diameter antennas may receive PNT signals for analysis. By analysing the parameters of the incoming signals, these parameters can be altered and used as the basis to transmit counterfeit PNT signals, via the two-metre dishes. In this regard, it is possible that the 14Ts227 performs both jamming and spoofing. Armada understands that the nine-metre antennas maybe used to uplink jamming signals into GNSS constellation satellites to prevent them receiving command signals, or other vital data, from the ground. Likewise, these large antennas could be employed for transmitting fake signals into the satellites for the same motivation.
Armada understands that 14Ts227 produces an Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) of circa 47 decibel-watts/dBW from one of its two-metre dishes. EIRP is a measure of signal strength at the antenna before the signal zooms out into the ether. The GNSS PNT receiver of a target located circa 40.5 nautical miles/nm (75 kilometres/km) from that antenna would intercept a jamming signal with a received power of around -86 dBW. While this sounds minute, it is over 2.6 million times stronger than a typical GNSS PNT signal arriving from space, which hits the Earth’s surface at a faint -150 to -160 dBW. Such overwhelming interference inundates the targeted receiver, preventing it from detecting the delicate satellite transmission beneath the artificial noise. Even at a range of 216 nm (400 km), the Tobol signal remains tens of thousands of times more powerful than the authentic PNT transmission.
With figures like these, it is no surprise that the 14Ts227 Tobol jammer, particularly the system located in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, has been blamed for so much GNSS disruption in the Baltic. Tobol’s existence, when seen as part of a wider array of counter-GNSS apparatus deployed by the Russian military, also underscores that Moscow is prepared to enact GNSS PNT denial at all levels of war.
One key concern for NATO members is that GNSS PNT jamming signals which are so powerful could also be effective against protected military encrypted signals like the P(Y) code transmitted by the United States’ Global Positioning System constellation. Military grade GPS systems must access the unencrypted civilian signal to make an electronic ‘handshake’ with the spacecraft they are to receive signals from. Blocking out all GPS signals within range of the jammer could prevent military users accessing PNT signals to make this handshake. NATO planners must consider the Kaliningrad 14Ts227 site a high-priority targets which should be destroyed early during any conflict with Russia. There is still much to learn regarding the 14Ts227 Tobol counter-GNSS system but through open-source analysis the equipment is unwittingly betraying its secrets.
by Dr. Thomas Withington
