U.S. Army trials backup system against full GPS jamming

Two companies say they’ve shown a way for U.S. military vehicles to stay connected and know their exact location even when GPS is completely jammed, a problem that has become a growing concern for the Pentagon as adversaries develop more powerful signal-jamming technology.

NAVSYS Corporation and ALL.SPACE tested the combined system during Arcane Thunder, a Department of War exercise that puts new military technology through live jamming conditions to see how it holds up. In the test, GPS signals were completely blocked, the scenario the military calls “GNSS-denied,” referring to the broader category of satellite navigation systems that includes GPS.

ALL.SPACE’s satellite communications terminal, called Hydra, kept the vehicle connected while it was moving, without any drop in performance. At the same time, NAVSYS equipment picked up other satellite signals in the area, ones not originally designed for navigation, and used them to calculate the vehicle’s position and precise timing instead. NAVSYS processes that data through a cloud-based service it calls PNT-as-a-Service, PNT being short for position, navigation and timing, the basic information any military vehicle, weapon or communications system needs to know where it is and coordinate with other units.

The key claim from both companies is that this worked from a single piece of equipment, with no loss of communication quality to get the backup positioning capability.

“Working together, NAVSYS and ALL.SPACE rapidly deployed a field-ready alternative-PNT and communications solution, which we were pleased to demonstrate under representative operational conditions at the Arcane Thunder live GPS jamming event,” said Dr. Alison Brown, CEO of NAVSYS Corporation.

“Arcane Thunder demonstrated the strength of combining NAVSYS’s PNTaaS with the ALL.SPACE platform to deliver resilient communications and assured PNT,” said John-Paul Szczepanik, Chief Technology Officer of ALL.SPACE. “Our joint approach showed how Signals of Opportunity can be collected, processed, and exploited without affecting connectivity.”

GPS jamming and spoofing have become a bigger operational problem for Western militaries in recent years, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where jamming has disrupted both military and civilian aircraft navigation. NAVSYS said it plans to expand its PNTaaS service into Europe specifically to cover areas where GPS interference is already a regular occurrence.

“We see the field ready hybrid SATCOM Hydra/PNTaaS product as the only near-term, fieldable solution to provide backup PNT capability in a completely L-band-denied environment by leveraging existing Ku- and Ka-band SATCOM signals for PNT,” Brown said. GPS normally operates on L-band frequencies; the companies’ approach instead draws on Ku- and Ka-band satellite signals, which are commonly used for satellite communications and are harder for adversaries to jam across the board.

NAVSYS, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was founded in 1986 and has focused on GPS and backup positioning technology for military and commercial customers since. ALL.SPACE, headquartered in the United Kingdom with U.S. operations based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, became a wholly owned subsidiary of York Space Systems in July after York completed a $355 million acquisition of the company. ALL.SPACE’s Hydra terminal is built to connect across multiple satellite orbits and frequency bands at once, a design meant to keep a signal available even if one satellite link is jammed or lost.