Today I had the privilege of going to watch how they release the 12Z sonde from Ganovce in Slovakia.
I also asked them if they noticed the GPS issues from the previous day, which they did.
Watching the whole process was quite interesting and I was especially amazed at the thoroughness of the knot 😁
I did also go and look for the sonde and got 1 km away from it but the location was unfortunately not accessible.
This was a weird one…
About halfway through the flight the number of satellites seen by the sonde started dropping. When it got to 6, it started giving timestamp errors. It then started sending out invalid GPS coordinates.
You can view the flight path and sensor data for RS41-SGP R5020799 on the SondeHub tracker! https://sondehub.org/R5020799
As you can see, it was reporting to be flying at 40m altitude in Belarus for some time. This data was reported by multiple receivers and also affected another sonde T0340269 which reported this identical path….
What would cause this? GPS spoofing by satellite? I’m very curious.
The sonde itself I located after it started picking up more satellites again and corrected the location for the rest of the flight. The meteo telemetry was correct for the whole flight.
Let me know in the comments, have you got any theories?
