He spoke with Inside GNSS about what Xona’s Pulsar means for the future of resilient PNT.
When Justin Deifel sat down with Inside GNSS at XPONENTIAL, it was his first media interview since joining Xona as vice president of government programs. The setting was fitting. Xona is moving Pulsar, its low Earth orbit (LEO) PNT service, toward operational status at a time when government, defense, infrastructure and commercial users are reassessing long-standing dependence on GNSS alone.
Deifel joined Xona in May after a career across the U.S. Space Force, Air Force, national security space and intelligence communities. His recent assignments included chief of staff for PEO Space Sensing, squadron commander and materiel leader for Resilient GPS, program manager and materiel leader for the Military SATCOM and PNT Directorate Futures division, and leadership roles supporting MUOS, the Enhanced Polar System Recapitalization and future GPS capabilities. Earlier, he worked at Edwards Air Force Base on test range capabilities and flight test programs, deployed to Afghanistan in support of air operations, led U.S. government and commercial testing related to terrestrial network interference with GPS, and managed elements of the GPS III space vehicle program.
“Rapid innovation in launch and satellite communications has shown that commercial companies can deliver capability at the speed of relevance,” Deifel said. “Xona is bringing that same approach to rethinking positioning, navigation and timing for the modern era with Pulsar.”
For Deifel, resilient PNT is no longer a future planning problem. “Over the past year, Xona has demonstrated on orbit what many inside government long believed would be impossible: broadcasting a new navigation signal alongside GPS while materially improving signal strength, precision and protection against jamming and spoofing,” he said. “Resilient PNT is not a future requirement. It is an operational requirement now, and Pulsar will be an important part of how that resilience gets delivered.”
That view reflects Deifel’s experience inside government programs, where promising capability can take years to field. He does not describe Pulsar as a replacement for GPS, GNSS, M-Code or other resilient PNT efforts, but as one layer in a broader architecture.
“Resilient PNT is not an either-or discussion,” he said. “Users benefit from multiple independent sources of PNT capability working together.”
Pulsar broadcasts in L-band, like GPS, which Deifel said means many existing GNSS devices can add support through software updates rather than new hardware. That integration path is central to his assessment of how new PNT capabilities become useful at scale.
“Having spent years inside government programs, the gap between promising technology and fielded operational capability is often underestimated,” he said. “Adoption depends on integration burden, cost, timelines, and whether users can realistically deploy it across various applications with different requirements.”
He pointed to M-Code as an example. Although M-Code has been broadcasting since 2005, he said, the government and industry are still building and integrating the user equipment needed to support it, delaying important capability for warfighters.
Deifel connected those fielding realities to current electronic warfare conditions and drone operations. Many platforms, particularly smaller or attritable systems, need resilient PNT at a size, scale and price traditional modernization pathways may struggle to serve. He described Xona as part of the “future infrastructure,” citing higher power, signal diversity and GPS independence as capabilities increasingly needed by both national security and commercial users.
“The time is now to begin thinking beyond a single-source PNT architecture,” Deifel said. “Pulsar’s capability will make a measurable difference in performance well before the full constellation is complete, and its value will only increase over time.”
Recent testing with commercial receiver partners, he added, has shown even one Pulsar satellite augmenting GNSS can improve urban availability and multipath performance, while enabling coarse-location authentication to help mitigate spoofing.
Max Eunice, a Xona spokesperson, said Deifel joins as Pulsar approaches operational status, with Xona’s manufacturing facility in place and its first production batch of satellites scheduled to launch in October.
