How TF can you shut down GPS for just a country? That's not how it works. And the US doesn't get paid or sees your position or anything when you use their GPS. It's an entirely passive system.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Iran could decide to purge itself of all GPS-reliant devices and use Beidou devices instead. They could go the extra mile and intentionally jam the GPS frequencies in its territory (or even broadcast their own signal to confuse receivers in enemy bombs), as long as those frequencies are not also used by Beidou.
But you're right in that GPS is a global system and the US is raining down RF everywhere in the world, whether the people there like it or not.
They can't jam GPS in the entire country. That kind of jamming is very localized to strategic sites. Country-wide jamming would be wildly expensive. They could (and probably already do) jam it at military bases and nuclear facilities, though.
The writing in this story is not accurate. Iran isn't turning it off for the country. They are talking about switching government services to use receivers that use Beidou as primary source of timing and maybe selectively turn off using GPS on those devices.
I'm guessing they banned it and switched to China's system to spy on their citizens.
China's system can't be used for spying. It's as passive as GPS. These things are harmless. No amount of control can be enacted through them.
Is it? I haven't looked too much into it, I just assumed a newer system would have tracking built-in.
So now I'm even more confused about why Iran would care which system it uses, if both truly are passive.
GPS and similar systems are just big atomic clocks flying around the earth, shouting their time down to earth. A GPS (or other) device just needs to know the current time and the position of the satellites to calculate its own position.
The most control the US ever exercised over GPS was to encrypt the more precise parts of the satellite's timestamps so that only military devices could get really precise positions. They stopped doing that when other systems went online. That was for the whole world, including its own citizens.
Cool, I looked into it and yeah, it seems like Beidou is incredibly similar to GPS, so it really shouldn't matter. GPS seems to be a little more accurate for the average person, but otherwise they're largely the same.