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 stop using GPS recievers, therefore nothing for GPS to connect to.

Its a slow transition, but it is one of magnitude. The US could shut down the satilites over Iran, like Starlink did it with Russia/Ukraine.

They are preparing for that, and mostly for the US to loose the power to potentially do it. It matters in case of all out war.

It's stupid to not just use all the available systems. Don't just support Beidou. Use Beidou, Galileo (European), GLONASS (Russia) and GPS. Makes lock on faster, increases precision and helps if one doesn't work for whatever reason.

The US cannot just shutdown Iran's usage. That would impact all other countries as well. GPS consists of only about 30 satellites for the whole world. Starlink satellites are much much lower and can thus be more easily associated with one country.

Echoing this, civilian GNSS is a passive system, and I'm all for redundancy, you should be using all four constellations for the highest accuracy and fastest lock.

Yes, you should use it for the fastest lock, but if your interest is to keep the US out of influence, ofc they would do it.

Either that, or they do it to please China hoping for an ally. Second option might be their played hand, even if it doesnt work.

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.

but if your interest is to keep the US out of influence, ofc they would do it.

this video just makes 0 sense. they didn't "disable" GPS and they most probably didn't just start using beidou today

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.

They can't shut down the satellites over Iran. That's not how GPS works. They aren't geostationary with tight beams like comm satellites. Every GPS satellite goes around the earth twice a day and has a beam that covers the entire earth plus something like 10 degrees on the sides out into space (circular, not actually side to side). While the US can turn off broadcasting while directly over very large swaths at a time (like, say, China and Russia), it isn't actually turned off on the ground because there will still be satellites over Europe or northern Africa that will be on and sending data at a higher angle to that large swath. It will be lower powered in that region because the signal power is lower at the edges, but it isn't off. Also, Iran is in the same region as US allies and US military bases: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc; so the US would be unlikely to want to lower GPS power in that region.

Starlink is very different in how it sends signals to the earth, which is why it can shut off services to areas.

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.