Seventeen years after federal regulators restricted a promising wireless technology to protect GPS and other spectrum users, they are being asked to loosen those limitations. Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) proponents insist the strictures are too tight and cut off their ability to innovate.

In June, Robert Bosch LLC formally requested the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) do what it said it would do back in April 2002: reexamine controls on UWB that the FCC itself called “extremely conservative” when they were written. The request is not to change the rules—not just yet anyway—but for the FCC to launch a rulemaking process that could eventually lead to changes in the rules. And Bosch wants a lot of changes.

Expand Ultra-Wide Band?

The company seeks to alter the definition of UWB, to allow more frequency-hopped emissions, stepped frequency and swept frequency
(frequency modulated continuous wave or FMCW) emissions. It is unreasonable, Bosch said, to continue to preclude all frequency-hopped UWB emissions below 10 GHz as well as pulsed, stepped and swept emissions.

The firm also wants to change the kinds of applications the rules allow. For example, it said, there is potential for using UWB imaging and surveillance systems for ranging, tracking and object classification; there are also opportunities in the home and building automation sectors for motion and presence detection. Bosch noted the EU allows UWB for fixed outdoor applications and location tracking. Bosch also said the use of UWB imaging and surveillance should not be limited to law enforcement, fire/rescue organizations, public utilities, mining and construction companies.

“A more generalized definition for UWB surveillance system applications is in order,” the firm said. “Within these more generic definitions should be included more flexible use cases (independent of user categories, which do not by themselves avoid misuse). If the definitional regulations are not preclusive of new UWB applications, and if there are clear, yet flexible technical requirements (including the flexibility to utilize varied emissions types), this would provide better interference protection than defining who the eligible users of unlicensed devices are and excluding most use cases in the process.”

Surveillance and imaging applications are not the only ones being unduly restricted, Bosch suggested. The firm noted that UWB technology can’t be employed for generic material sensing or the operation of toys. UWB operation is not allowed inside vehicles, onboard aircraft, ships or satellites.

Of the large number of potential UWB devices and applications, NTIA and others have tested only a small number, and those test results cannot be extrapolated to include, for example, the total power of a UWB communications network, or the aggregate, cumulative effect of UWB devices.” – Air Transport Association and affiliated organizations including the U.S. GPS Industry Council

Some of the controls, Bosch insisted, don’t make any sense. For example, while it’s OK to use UWB to determine what is inside a wall, it is not OK to use UWB as a stud finder.

“The current UWB rules (principally but not exclusively the technical and definitional rules) are so stringent,” Bosch wrote, “that of necessity, virtually all new UWB products and systems must apply to the Commission for, and be subject to a waiver as an incident of being granted certification for marketing and sale of the device in the United States.”

In the Beginning

Those rules took shape during a fight started by the FCC itself in October 1998, when the agency launched an inquiry into whether UWB devices could be allowed to operate on an unlicensed basis under the Commission’s Part 15 rules. UWB uses very low power signals and precisely timed pulses—rather like the ping of a tuning fork—to transmit data, sense objects or do unusual tasks like “see” through walls. UWB capabilities are enabled, in part, by the fact that its signals range across hundreds, sometimes thousands, of megahertz of frequencies. But because the signal power is low, and the pings short-lived, the chance of interference is lower.

While the risk to many existing uses of radio frequencies may be limited, there was almost immediate concern about UWB’s potential to impact another low-powered signal: GPS.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was one of the first to respond to the FCC’s 1998 inquiry, saying that allowing UWB systems to operate in restricted bands would degrade the safety of the nation’s air traffic control system.

“In the case of the FAA, the restricted bands are allocated to services used for critical aeronautical safety services,” the agency wrote. “The FAA is opposed to any authorization of licensed or unlicensed UWB systems to intentionally radiate in these bands. It is likely that authorizing even limited operation of such systems will lead to further proliferation of UWB systems as new applications for their use are developed. Civil aviation’s requirement for protected radio spectrum, including that supporting critical communications, navigation, and surveillance safety services, is paramount.”

The GPS Industry Council expressed concern early on that operation of UWB systems in bands that overlap with the GPS frequency bands would cause interference with a wide range of safety-of-life applications. “Any increase in the basic noise floor will significantly reduce the ability of the receiver to acquire a GPS signal or even to maintain tracking of a GPS signal, or cause errors in position or time accuracy. Any of these consequences is intolerable to the GPS user segment.”

Over the course of the next four years—in a process that Bosch called “contentious”—the GPS community and a host of users of other bands argued with UWB advocates about opening the airwaves to the new technology. A total of 1,167 documents were filed in a docket that was finally closed in 2014.

In the case of GPS, the discussion evolved into hardware testing. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) tested a series of GPS receivers to determine how they would stand up if the satellite navigation bands were used for a range of different UWB applications. NTIA is the coordinating agency for government uses of the spectrum—which includes the frequencies relied upon by the Air Force-run GPS constellation—and its input carries significant weight. The results informed restrictions on UWB frequencies that barred nearly all applications from using GPS bands, limited emissions and put in place other restrictions when the FCC issued its First Report and Order in 2002.

Getting to the testing process, however, was not all that smooth. The FCC said, at first, that it would allow time for testing and then asked for results in four months, which experts said was not enough time for full studies. Initially there was no money budgeted for the testing, some of which was also done by Stanford University, the University of Texas and the Applied Physics Laboratory working in cooperation with Johns Hopkins University. Thirty days into the 4-month test period a total of $600,000 was scraped together by the FAA and its parent agency, the Department of Transportation, only to have a member of Congress step in and freeze the transfer of the funds. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), then the head of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, called the FAA Administrator and asked that the funds be held pending the development of fair and effective parameters for the tests. Time Domain, one of the key UWB players involved in the rulemaking, was a constituent of Shelby’s, who is still in Congress and now holds one of the most powerful jobs in Washington: chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In 2018 Time Domain became part of Humatics, a microlocation technology company which maintains an office in Huntsville, Alabama, where Time Domain was based.

The military also weighed in on allowing UWB. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote to the Secretary of Commerce saying, “UWB must be regulated in a way to protect military and civil use of GPS and other critical systems.” According to references in the filings, DOD took the position that it was necessary to limit UWB devices to operating at 4.2 GHz or above, except, perhaps, for imaging devices. Sprint PCS said in a filing that it was aware of similar concerns about harmful interference to various other services, suggesting that the FCC could provide adequate protection to all existing services by limiting UWB emissions to above 6 GHz.

Testing, Testing

The tests found that UWB signals could interfere with GPS. The FCC analyzed the results across more than 16 pages of its First Report and Order, which was posted in the docket May 17. In the end, the Commission concurred that extra care was needed to protect GPS users.

“Of particular concern is the impact of any potential interference to the GPS band at 1559–1610 MHz,” the FCC wrote. The Commission also expressed concern about “interference to any additional frequencies allocated to GPS, e.g., the planned L5 frequency in the 960-1215 MHz band. GPS will be increasingly relied upon for air navigation and safety, and is a cornerstone for improving the efficiency of the air traffic system. GPS also may be used by commercial mobile radio E-911 services to enable police and fire departments to quickly locate individuals in times of emergency. Moreover, businesses and consumers are now employing GPS for various applications, such as for navigation by automobiles, boats and other vehicles, surveying, hiking, and geologic measurements. Therefore, any harmful interference to GPS could have a serious detrimental impact on public safety, businesses and consumers. In addition, propagation losses are not as great below 2 GHz, and services in this region of the spectrum tend to employ omnidirectional antennas that do not discriminate against undesired signals. These factors tend to increase the risks of interference below 2 GHz.”

To address these risks but still allow some the use of UWB, the FCC devised a complex set of application-by-application, band-by-band restrictions including limits on the Equivalent Isotropically Radiated Power (EIRP) of out-of-band emissions (OOBE). For example, through-the-wall imaging systems—which, as the name implies, enable users to determine the location or movement of people or objects on the other side of a wall or similar structure—were only allowed to operate below 960 MHz or in the frequency band 1.99-10.6 GHz. The OOBE into in the 960-1610 MHz band from these devices had to be kept at or below –53.3 decibel-milliwatts (dBm) and –51.3 dBm or less in the 1610–1990 band. Their use was limited to law enforcement, fire and rescue organizations.

Systems that image what’s inside walls or structures like the side of a bridge or the wall of a mine must operate below 960 MHz or in the frequency band 3.1–10.6 GHz. Their operation is restricted to law enforcement, fire and rescue organizations and to scientific research institutions, commercial mining companies and construction firms.

High-frequency systems operating with a –10 dB bandwidth between 3.1 GHz and 10.6 GHz—which includes some ground penetrating radars (GPRs), communications and measuring systems as well as wall and medical imaging devices—need to keep the EIRP of their OOBE to –65.3 dBm or less in the 960-1610 band and at –53.3 dBm or less in the 1610–1990 band. This class of UWB imaging systems also requires government coordination.

What’s Next?

The importance of doing more tests as an element of expanding future UWB usage was highlighted during the original debate by a coalition of more than three dozen firms and organizations including the Air Transport Association, several airlines, GPS receiver manufacturers, surveyors, telecommunications firms, and the U.S. GPS Industry Council.

“The broad range of prospective UWB devices includes many different types of signals in many potential bands and their measurement and analysis is very complex,” the coalition wrote, on March 27, 2001. “However, effective and reliable measurement of the emissions from these devices is critical to assess whether and how UWB pulse position modulation technologies can be successfully and safely introduced into the frequency domain without life threatening or other adverse effects on existing operations. Of the large number of potential UWB devices and applications, NTIA and others have tested only a small number, and those test results cannot be extrapolated to include, for example, the total power of a UWB communications network, or the aggregate, cumulative effect of UWB devices. So, despite the testing done to date, adequate measurement and analysis of the effect of the full range of potential UWB devices on other spectrum users has not yet been done.”

Protecting incumbent spectrum users isn’t just about testing the different UWB applications, but also about assessing how many UWB devices there will be and where they will be, wrote Per Enge, then an associate professor at Stanford and part of its GPS Lab.

“While one, or even a small number of such UWB interference sources may cause only a small degradation in the noise level of wireless communications receivers, as well as GPS receivers…” Enge wrote in comments in September 1999, “large numbers of such UWB interference sources distributed over an area can raise significantly the overall noise level of all receivers in the area. Such a noise level increase will significantly reduce the sensitivity of the receivers and with it wireless communications system range and GPS performance.”

Moreover, he said, the increase in the noise floor caused by a UWB device at some distance from a GPS receiver may be small but grows as the separation decreases.

“With proliferation of UWB sources throughout an area, the likelihood of at least one UWB interference source being close enough to any particular wireless communications or GPS receiver to cause a significant increase in its noise level increases significantly.”

The GPS Innovation Alliance (GPSIA) argued this August against opening a new rulemaking as Bosch requested, saying that there has been no change in the technical analysis underpinning the existing UWB rules since they were created in 2002. Indeed, the suggestion that UWB devices have been able to operate without creating interference or raising the noise floor is not an argument against the need for strict rules, as Bosch suggested, but proof that the existing limitations are working, GPSIA wrote.

Moreover, some of the more “generic” rules being sought by Bosch would open the door to much higher OOBE levels, GPSIA said. The EIRP in the 1559–1601 MHz band would jump by up to “a staggering 29 dB” for vehicular radar, an application the FCC expected in 2002 to become “as essential to passenger safety as airbags.” That jump is “certainly not ‘negligible,’ ” GPSIA wrote.

Given the potential for dramatic increases in OOBE in critical safety-of-life bands, GPSIA said, and the lack of any technical analysis in the petition supporting the assertion that added UWB operations would not create harmful interference, new rules that facilitate the en masse introduction of more “generic” UWB devices “do not merit further consideration.”

GPS is a critical service to both civil and military users, GPSIA said in its filing, and has generated an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits since it was made available for civilian and commercial use in the 1980s.

“Most benefits have accrued in the last 10 years and are spread among many major commercial sectors in the United States that have adopted GPS including 14 of 16 industries deemed infrastructure,” GPSIA wrote. Interference issues are, “if anything, even more important today given the natural proliferation of GPS and GPS-enabled devices embedded in practically all walks of American life.”

“The potential of UWB devices to interfere with GPS was (and continues to be) well established. Based on the robust record, the Commission prudently chose a conservative approach to ensure interference from UWB devices will not degrade the performance of GPS signals,” said GPSIA.

There is nothing new in the technology or the petition that argues for changing those rules, GPSIA said, and loosening the limitations, as proposed by Bosch, creates risks. “The absence of an increased noise floor or a rise in interference is hardly a reason to start a rulemaking to overhaul the rules” GPSIA wrote; “once that damage is done, it cannot be undone.”

Dee Ann Divis has covered GNSS and the aerospace industry since the early 1990s, writing for Jane’s International Defense Review, the Los Angeles Times, AeroSpace Daily and other publications. She was the science and technology editor at United Press International for five years, leaving for a year to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow.

The post Washington View: Ultra-Wideband Re-Emerges As GPS Interference Issue appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

The focus of that effort is on PNT as it relates to critical infrastructure, which is in line with NSPD-39: U.S. Space-Based Position, Navigation, and Timing Policy (National Security Presidential Directive-39). For more details on NSPD-39, see the Federation of American Scientists’ Fact Sheet.

“I’d like to read you just a few things that our secretary, (DHS) Secretary (Kirstjen) Nielsen said regarding critical infrastructure and the world that we’re in today,” Platt told attendees at the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee (CGSIC) meeting Tuesday.

She told those attending the standup of the National Risk Management Center in September that in the months prior to 9/11 then-CIA director George Tenet said the systems were blinking red. “We’d heard enough chatter to know that danger was coming we just didn’t know where.” Recently Dan Coats, the director of the National Intelligence Agency, said something similar, Nielsen continued.” “The system is ‘blinking red once again. …Our digital lives are in danger like never before. But it’s more than that; we are witnessing an historic change across the entire threat landscape.’ ”

“So that’s the environment that we’re facing right now,” said Platt. “It’s not just about the hackers that are going to put something out there and hack into the local system. We have to realize that there are nation states that are willing to target our critical infrastructure.”

To address this, Platt’s team — which is now part of that new National Risk Management Center — is working on a risk management structure and reaching out to industry to establish partnerships.

“Over 90 percent of the critical structure in the United States is owned by the private sector,” Platt said. “So, if they’re using GPS and they’re dependent on GPS — or heavily reliant — it’s up to us to help them understand the risk. But ultimately those companies are going to make decisions on the overall risk picture that they’re facing and we have to make a compelling argument that they should at least address the PNT vulnerabilities that potentially exist.”

To do that Platt’s team is doing testing to help industry understand those risks. They are sharing best practices with manufacturers and end users. He also mentioned the possibility of more advanced steps like having standards for certain receivers and possibility of a backup system.

“We can’t back up GPS for everything. If we could — if we could field a system that matched GPS in every aspect and we could do it on a budget that’s less, then why would we need GPS? The answer’s pretty simple; we can’t do that. We have to find ways of identifying what’s critical, making sure there’s security and resiliency in those critical systems.”

The 58^thmeeting of the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee (CGSIC) meeting took place Monday and Tuesday in conjunction with the ION GNSS+ 2018 technical meeting.

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Though this expanded effort has to fulfill a long established requirement — the Air Force must develop a multi-service, handheld receiver — the GPS program is now also working on a congressional mandate requiring that American military equipment also incorporate signals from other nation’s satellite navigation constellations, maybe even all of those constellations.

Progress So Far
Under the Military GPS User Equipment program (MGUE), the Air Force’s GPS Directorate is developing receiver cards that will plug into existing equipment, enabling them to utilize the new military M-Code. M-Code capable receivers, which are being developed in a two-increment process, will have enhanced positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) capabilities and be more resistant to jamming and other threats. The M-Code signal from the upcoming GPS III satellites is also supposed to be stronger.

Three contractors — L3 Technologies, Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, and Rockwell Collins — are working to create both the cards and the cyber-secure software that goes with them. However, once the initial cards are ready and tested the Air Force will not be doing the usual direct procurement. The three contractors instead will compete to sell the cards across all the different military users.

Increment 1 focuses on receiver cards for ground equipment and aviation/ maritime uses and includes testing in four lead platforms: the Army’s Stryker ground combat vehicle; the Air Force’s B-2 Spirit bomber; the Marine Corps’ Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV); and the Navy’s DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyer.

This summer Raytheon’s miniaturized GPS airborne receiver, the MAGR-2K-M, underwent a successful prototype and system functional check on the B-2 — confirming the card could draw power, put out the right data and that that data was being received by the B-2 systems in the appropriate format. A year earlier L3 successfully completed the security certification process, the first of the three contractors to do so, said Director Col. Steven Whitney of the GPS Directorate.

To achieve certification, Whitney told Inside GNSS, “we’re required to make sure that the unit properly decrypts the M-Code signal. More importantly with security certification we need to make sure that the unit doesn’t release any of the critical parameter information or that the key security information is not able to get out. We want these things to be unclassified when keyed because we want young airmen, soldiers, sailors and marines to take these things and use them in the field. And if it can only be done in classified environment that’s obviously not effective.”

Rockwell and Raytheon are “coming up real close” on certification, said Whitney. Each has submitted designs whose performance will be judged against test data. “So, we’re in that conversation with each of them and they’re at different stages, as you might imagine. And I don’t want to get ahead of myself, speculating when they’re going to be done — but I would expect it in the next year or so,” he said.

“Our small form factor MGUE hardware development for both airborne and ground is stable and validated in both developmental environmental test and in receiver signal performance testing using M-Code signal simulators,” said Jade Groen, principal program manager for MGUE at Rockwell Collins in a written comment sent before the holidays. “We have also validated the receiver has achieved very low power consumption while achieving high reliability mean time between failures. We are looking forward to completing our security certification with the GPS-D in 2018.”

Increment 1 will most likely be completed in 2022, said Whitney, though a lot remains to be done. “I’ve got to complete my testing program and then we’ve got to go into our integration efforts and we’ve got to go with the operational testing,” he said, noting that the first operational tests would probably be with the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

GAO: So, What’s the Plan?
Despite the progress made in Increment 1 the new cards are not ready, which creates a problem.

Concerned about slow M-Code adoption, Congress passed a law in 2011 that forbade the purchase of anything but M-Code capable receivers starting in fiscal year 2018 (FY18). Fortunately the Secretary of Defense was given the power to waive the requirement in some cases — including when M-Code receivers were not available. A blanket waiver has been granted “for at least a year,” said Whitney.

That waiver may well be extended as integration and the related engineering is shaping up to be the really complicated part of receiver modernization.

A December 12 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) underscores the enormity of upgrading the Pentagon’s vast inventory of GPS-enabled equipment. The overall effort will likely take more than a decade and “many billions of dollars to complete” — an estimate based on experience.

“DoD (Department of Defense) has previously transitioned its weapon systems gradually from one generation of GPS receivers to the next,” explained GAO. “For example, some weapon systems have either upgraded or are still in the process of upgrading to the current SAASM receivers that were introduced in 2003, while others are still equipped with older cards. DoD anticipates that the length of time necessary to transition to MGUE will require users to operate with a mix of receiver cards.”

So far the military has identified more than 700 types of weapons systems that will need to be upgraded — an effort requiring almost one million receiver cards. Moreover, there is significant work remaining to verify the new cards work as planned and to develop them further after the MGUE Increment 1 program ends. And, so far, the money to do all of this isn’t there.

“Of the 716 types of weapon systems that will need M-Code receiver cards,” wrote GAO, “only 28 — or less than 4 percent — are fully funded through fiscal year 2021. The remainder have either partially funded M-Code development and integration efforts (72 weapon systems), or do not yet have funding planned (616 weapon systems).”

The integration challenge is substantial, warned Cristina Chaplain, GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management and the lead on the December report.

“There’re technical challenges that include security and backwards compatibility,” Chaplain told a June meeting on space policy sponsored by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and FiscalTrak. “There’s a council in place to help organize all this user equipment, but they may not have the authority to really prioritize things. So, it’s a big issue because essentially you’re going to waste capability in space if you have M-Code satellites and you don’t have the receivers on the ground to take advantage of them. Once these receivers are developed and handed over to the military services, they’re going to have to do more development themselves to get them to fit the equipment that they have, and that’s going to take time. Then they have to install these receivers on all kinds of weapons platforms, which takes up to 10 years.”

Some problems could be ameliorated if there was a centralized coordinating organization that gathered up and shared solutions to integration issues. According to the report, the MGUE Increment 1 program is already capturing all the issues observed in receiver test card risk reduction testing and sharing this information through a joint reporting system. “However,” GAO wrote, “while non-lead platforms may also report deficiencies in this system, there is no requirement that they do so, nor is there an entity responsible for ensuring data from testing, design, and development is shared between programs.”

Without such sharing and coordination, said GAO, the Pentagon “risks paying to repeatedly find design solutions to solve common problems because each program office is likely to undertake its own uncoordinated development effort. Some duplicated effort may already be occurring. Air Force officials have expressed concern that work is already being duplicated across the military services in developing embedded GPS systems to be integrated.”

The Army also has approached GAO with specific concerns about coordinating MGUE, Chaplain told attendees.

“When you have the Army folks coming to GAO to tell you they need more centralized authority on user equipment, you know there’s an issue,” she told the meeting. “You don’t go to GAO unless something is wrong.”

And Now — Increment 2
Meanwhile, as planned, the Air Force has launched into Increment 2 wherein it is to develop compact receiver cards for uses where size, weight, and power are a constraint. As noted earlier, the GPS Directorate is also tasked with developing a handheld receiver to be carried by both U.S. and allied warfighters.

“Increment 2 is currently in the requirements definition phase and we’re having a — we (meaning) the Department of Defense — is having a lengthy conversation about what needs to be in and what needs to be out in terms of the requirements,” said Whitney. As of last fall all the services were submitting requirements and discussions were underway, he said, about what was achievable versus what might be a technology leap too far. To support the debate the Air Force was doing research into the current state of technology.

Part of that research entailed a request for information on technologies available to support the handheld receiver. Special Notice 17-095, released in September, said the expected annual production rate was between 2,600 and 5,200 units per year. “There is a potential for procuring additional Handhelds (tens of thousands), the Air Force wrote, “that may be procured by other DoD Services, plus U.S. allies as Foreign Military Sales.”

Interestingly the Air Force seems open to expanding beyond its current contractor base. In addition to describing things like the needed battery life the Air Force asked responders about the business conditions they would need to enter the MGUE handheld market including the rate of return required on nonrecurring engineering investments and the payback period.

The GAO said in its report that the Air Force planned to deliver the acquisition strategy for Increment 2 in March.

That, however, was before Congress got involved. With the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 (NDAA) lawmakers tossed a brand new requirement into the mix.

Change in Plans
Language in the report accompanying the final NDAA bill ordered the Pentagon to ensure that GPS user equipment for the military had the capability to “receive trusted signals from the Galileo satellites of the European Union and the QZSS satellites of Japan.” The Secretary of Defense must also assess “the feasibility, benefits, and risks” of having user equipment be capable of receiving non-allied signals. The details for doing all this are to be in a plan due back to Congress in June.

On December 7, the Air Force issued a pre-solicitation notice on Fed Biz Ops (number 18-022), looking for information to help it devise an acquisition strategy.

The request asked responders to look at three use cases. In the first the GPS satellite Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP) is insufficient or intermittent. Tactical units operating or traveling between Bagram Air Base and Kabul, Afghanistan experience GPS performance degradation due to signal blockage caused by mountains, foliage, and, in Kabul, urban buildings. The MGUE receiver knows its approximate position and is to acquire and track multi-GNSS signals for a PNT solution.

In the second use case, there is a problem affecting multiple GPS signals from multiple GPS satellites. The GPS signals are visible, but may have various anomalies that render some of them inaccurate or unreliable. The MGUE receiver is keyed, knows its approximate position and has successfully acquired one or more M-Code signals. The receiver is to remove the bad signals and attempt to acquire and track multi-GNSS signals for an improved PNT solution.

In the third case the GPS Master Control Station is dealing with an anomaly and has completely shut down its operations. The MGUE receiver has determined that the current accuracy of GPS signals is insufficient to perform the mission. With a keyed MGUE receiver and no available GPS signals the receiver must recognize the absence or degradation of usable GPS signals and attempt to use multi-GNSS signals for a PNT solution.

The non-military signals to be used for these sample cases, that is those multi-GNSS signals that can be tapped in addition to military and civil GPS signals, are:

• Galileo: E1OS, E5a
• Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS): L1C, L2C, L5 
• Space Based Augmentation System (SBAS): L1, L5

Whitney said that even though the requirements process for Increment 2 is underway there is time to include requirements for a new multi-GNSS receiver — if the Pentagon decides it wants to.

“What you would you have to have happen,” he said, “is you have to have the requirements process decide that this is a capability that the department wants to include in this increment.”

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A highly anticipated presentation by Ligado Networks to the nation’s leading satellite navigation experts took an unexpected turn when the company said it could not provide essential network information because it was looking to the government for technical direction and its business plans were still in flux.

The firm had been invited to address the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Advisory Board after Ligado CEO Doug Smith sent a letter to board Vice Chairman Brad Parkinson suggesting that questions about what the firm was proposing reflected “willful blindness” to the details available about the firm’s plans. The firm also questioned why Iridium, a competitor and critic, had been invited to speak before the board.

Smith had originally accepted the invitation to address the board’s fall meeting in Redondo Beach, California but, according to sources, the lineup was changed at the last minute. The presentation was given instead by Valerie Green, Ligado’s executive vice president and chief legal officer and a frequent representative in regulatory matters.

Though members of the board complimented Green for her articulate presentation they were disappointed at the lack of technical detail.

“In our letter to you we asked certain specifics,” said Parkinson. “In particular we asked for your operating configuration — not for those numbers which are subject to analysis and a heck of a lot of controversy, but instead the spacing, the density, the antenna types, the power levels and what propagation model you’re using to say that you’d have demonstrated the capability.”

The letter sent to Ligado also asked, Parkinson said, for information on the radius around the tower within which GPS receivers would be affected — an approach taken by the Department of Transportation (DoT) for its Adjacent Band Compatibility Assessment.

“I still don’t know what you’re proposing,” Parkinson told Green. “I see some numbers on a board but I do not see a statement on how you achieve those numbers because the probability is we are going to have a great argument over how the propagation works, how the multi-path works, how multiple towers work — and without that data we can’t get around to saying yes to you folks.”

“The propagation model, that is the appropriate propagation model to be used to evaluate whether or not the proposal that we currently have actually will protect GPS — that’s to be determined by the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) and the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) who are the government agency experts on those sorts of things,” responded Green, who said the board might have input into that determination. “… I think that our sense is that the proper way to determine what is the right propagation model that should be applied to our proposal to see if it actually will do what we say is that the government should determine that.”

Also still to be determined, according to Green, is the number and distribution of the ground stations the firm will need to address its planned market. The firm hopes to provide Industrial Industry-of-Things connectivity to the manufacturing, natural resources, commercial transportation, supply management and utility industries.

“One of the things that we are focused on,” said Green, “is thinking about how to meet the needs of specific customers rather than just building and deploying a network and figuring out our theories on where it should go. We’re interested in meeting the specific needs of these industries — and their particular needs are emerging. So exactly how many towers we have will be determined by what our customers’ needs are. But it will be substantially lower than the number of towers necessary to build a nationwide network like the one that AT&T has, like the one that Verizon has or like the one that our predecessor proposed.”

It was also too soon to offer details on antenna types, she said. “I can tell you that the antennas will be developed to protect GPS, but in terms of where we are with that, it’s just too soon in the process to know exactly what the antenna will look like.”

FAA and Ligado
Some antenna characteristics were available, she said, based on the company’s work with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). That information included the antennas’ downtilt angle and the height of the antennas as well as how tall the towers would be.

“I think if you were to give us a representative high-density laydown of your towers — just in terms of a two dimensional, what kind of separation and maybe what kind of antenna height associated with that — we could use the antenna gain patterns from the FAA information and combine that with some of the testing results, including of some of the test results of the RTK receivers, in order to start getting a numerical handle on things,” said board member John Betz of MITRE.

That information is available in the FAA documentation, said Green, and the inter-site distance used in the FAA analysis was 433 meters between sites. “And as I said, the power levels were set to account for the aggregate effect of a network, right, so it isn’t just each tower individually it’s all of them all the way out to the horizon.”

Ken Alexander, chief scientific and technical advisor for satellite navigation systems at the FAA, who happened to be in the audience, described the agency’s analysis at the request of the board. He said the FAA had reached out to RTCA, its standards-setting body for both technical and operational inputs regarding Ligado Networks’ proposal. Those inputs, Alexander said, included their proposed assessment of the propagation models built upon earlier work done on the LightSquared proposal.

“The FAA assessed the maximum power level that would protect GPS use by certified aircraft receivers outside of a proposed assessment zone, he said. While GPS reception is not assured inside the zone, “the FAA-assessed maximum power level is consistent with the range of powers that Ms. Green has stated.”

Alexander said the FAA has not completed a comprehensive assessment of the potential operational effects of the proposed assessment zones on all certified aircraft receiver applications. They are continuing to review potential impacts to non-certified, fixed-wing, helicopter and GPS receiver applications for unmanned aircraft and the many other civil applications as part of the ongoing Adjacent Band Compatibility study”

“We (the FAA) have no agreement with Ligado Networks but we have assessed a number that will be in the DoT report that is within the range that she (Green) spoke to,” Alexander told Parkinson, noting again there was not an extensive operational assessment.

DoT’s Karen Van Dyke brief ly reviewed for the board the ABC Assessment results so far, having presented them at an earlier meeting. She noted that some high-precision receivers, which are a focus of concern for interference, could be impacted by a tower transmitting kilometers away.

Air Force Weighs In
The Air Force also spoke about the work they had done for the ABC Assessment including their participation in the planning and the testing they had done.

Though the results are classified, said Capt. Robyn Anderson, who is in GPS Spectrum Management at the GPS Directorate, the DoD test results support the conclusions briefed by the DoT and “we fully support and back those recommendations and encourage decisions to be made upon those data driven recommendations.”

The goal is not to prevent any type of innovation, said Anderson, but we cannot support innovation that will degrade GPS operations.

The Air Force also gave attendees a paper addressing the value of using a 1 decibel (dB) decrease in C/N0 as the appropriate interference protection criterion – that is a measurement intended to indicate when you are nearing a level of harmful interference as opposed to the level that causes harmful interference.

“So the Air Force does obviously support the 1 dB interference protection criteria,” Anderson said noting that by the time a military receiver experiences harmful interference it’s too late and the mission could be put at risk.

“When you’re talking about the framework of national security that to us is not acceptable at all,” Anderson said. “So our focus will continue to be on protecting the radio frequency environment instead of handpicking receivers and transferring the interference mitigation responsibility to the receiver manufacturers.”

NASCTN Controversy
Green answered a question about her characterization of the tests done by the National Advanced Spectrum and Communications Test Network (NASCTN) as showing that GPS operations could coexist with a Ligado network — an assertion made during her talk that has been said also in other forums.

“Although you referenced the NASCTN tests there,” said Betz, “I think it’s very important to understand what NASCTN itself said the objectives of that test were. And, as you know there were two objectives — one was to develop a test methodology and the other was to illustrate that test methodology. There was never an attempt to actually develop the definitive results that would lead to a compatibility assessment. And in fact, as you know, there were many comments that suggested things that could be done to make the test more comprehensive and lead to a compatibility assessment. They decided those were out of scope. So, I think it’s dangerous to list that as a test, with the implication that it leads to a compatibility assessment when that was not the specific intent.”

“I agree with you sir that it was not the specific intent,” Green said. “They did in fact develop a test methodology which, I happen to think is great and they did in fact do it (the testing). And as a result of that there was, in fact, data which our engineers interpreted. That’s what engineers do with data.” It was that interpretation, she indicated, that supported the assertion that GPS operators and Ligado could coexist

Signal expert Logan Scott followed a data-focused approach, using results from earlier tests to give a fuller picture of the NASCTN test results. In one example the data indicated high precision and RTK receivers with ordinary antennas would lose lock at about 8 kilometers from the interference source. Another example showed receivers performing better in the face of interference — suggesting, he said, based on his experience, false signal acquisition.

It’s All in the Details
In the end, the lack of technical specifics from Ligado played a role in the Advisory Board’s decision to draft a letter opposing allowing the firm to proceed under its modified concept of operations. Beyond the problem with being able to fully evaluate the plan there was concern about whether the proposed power levels would stay where they are and about interference with uncertified aviation receivers — including those to be used in the fast-growing drone industry.

The members broadly agreed, however, that should Ligado come back with a fleshed-out plan, one that addressed the interference concerns, then the Advisory Board should give them another opportunity.

“We’re a public board. We’re serving the taxpayer. If it’s an issue still on the table and we think it’s important to GPS — and they come in and say ‘Hey we got you this time. We’re really going to tell you’ — I think we’ve got to let them talk,” said Parkinson.

The letter is to go to the National Executive Committee or ExCom, the focal point for interagency decisions involving PNT. Comprising top leaders from across government the ExCom is co-chaired by the deputy secretaries of Defense and Transportation — Patrick Shanahan and Jeffrey Rosen, respectively. It is expected to meet sometime this January.

Though some Advisory Board members recused themselves all the remaining members voted to back the ExCom letter as outlined.

“The PNT Advisory Board strongly believes,” the draft said at the end of the meeting, “that approval of the new license modification application is not in the public interest and the proposed use should not be permitted. All members of the PNT Advisory Board who have not otherwise recused themselves are unanimous in this view.”

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After several years of shifting plans the competition to build the next tranche of GPS III satellites is poised to start, though the context in which that contest will take place has changed markedly from when planning first began.

The Request For Proposals (RFP) will go out in November 2017, the Air Force told Inside GNSS in response to a query. If that seems somewhat later than expected, it is. In a June 28 presentation, the GPS Directorate’s Deputy Director Col. Gerry Gleckel told the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Advisory Board the RFP would be out by the end of the 2017 fiscal year — that is by Sept. 30, 2017. Other than a delay, the November release should not create any new issues.

Gleckel also told the PNT Advisory Board that for cost and scheduling reasons the Air Force plans to select, and stick with, one contractor to build all 22 satellites.

“Every time we restart that (process), it’s billions of dollars in nonrecurring engineering costs,” Gleckel said. “There’s delay going through the satellite design process and in qualification. We want to get some more stability in our satellites.”

If the Air Force does indeed choose a winner-take-all approach, it will add to the pressure on would-be contractors. Not only will unsuccessful bidders lose out on what promises to be a multibillion dollar contract, but the plan puts losing firms at a long-term disadvantage when it comes to future GPS-related deals. Key personnel and expertise will naturally coalesce around the new prime contractor, which according to Gleckel’s presentation, will be developing and then building and launching GPS III satellites into 2033 — that is for the next 16 years. That’s a long time for a losing bidder to maintain resources while it waits for another chance.

A Long Process
The initial GPS III contract won by Lockheed Martin in 2008 was for two research and development satellites plus five options to build pairs of additional spacecraft for a total of 12 GPS IIIA satellites. The next phase, which was to be the GPS IIIB tranche of eight more spacecraft, was to be awarded in roughly 2011 followed sometime later by the final contract for 16 GPS IIIC spacecraft. The Air Force, however, retained the right to re-compete the procurement for GPS IIIB and GPS IIIC — a hedge against poor performance or the need to secure the industrial base for future space developments. That turned out to be a wise decision.

Work on IIIA started off smoothly but internal interference problems developed in the payload as ITT Exelis, the payload subcontractor, worked to add new signals. (Exelis became part of Harris Corp. in 2015). There were other problems as well including a failure to qualify and then properly test a ceramic capacitor — an oversight that added four months to the program’s already delayed schedule. The Air Force became increasingly annoyed and didn’t mind saying so in public.

“Obviously, we want a GPS III that does what it’s supposed to do, delivered on time,” said Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, during the 2016 National Space Symposium, according to Defense News.

By 2014 GPS officials were so frustrated they went out of their way to boost competition for Lockheed Martin, creating a two-phase process for the follow-on procurement. Under Phase 1 they planned to award up to two Production Readiness Firm Fixed Price contracts worth $200 million each. The winners were to go through critical design review for the space vehicle and navigation payload with demonstrations and qualification of the satellite subsystem boxes. Then, in Phase 2, the Phase 1 firm or firms would compete against Lockheed Martin (which, along with Exelis, was barred from competing in Phase 1). The prize, after all of this, was a deal for as many as 22 satellites.

That plan, however, did not last. In May 2015, under budget pressure from sequestration, the Air Force reframed the competition to allow Lockheed Martin to compete — but shrunk the award from $200 million to a scant $6 million per firm. That money was to enable them only to demonstrate that they had, or could attain, a long list of capabilities, including the ability to produce an average of two satellites a year (down from the previous requirement to be able to produce two to three spacecraft annually).

The Air Force went ahead with the scaled-down awards, inking Production Readiness Feasibility Assessment contracts with Boeing Network and Space Systems, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, and Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in May 2016.

Phase 2
Earlier this year, in an April 19 Special Notice posted on Fed Biz Opps, Air Force Space Command announced the next step in its two-phase selection process — an Industry Day for potential GPS III bidders to be held May 4, 2017 in El Segundo, Calif. The Air Force wanted to share information on its plans with potential bidders and get feedback from them on what it intended to do. According to the notice, an RFP for a fixed-price contract to begin delivering GPS III spacecraft in 2025 was to be released later in 2017 with an announcement of the winning contractor to be made late in 2018.

Interestingly, the notice made clear that the three winners of Phase 1 were not the only ones being invited to compete. “Participation in Phase 1,” the Air Force wrote, “is not a prerequisite to participation in Phase 2.”

Even so, it’s unlikely that firms outside of the Phase 1 winners will compete, said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project and of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They are leaving it open that another company could bid,” he told Inside GNSS at the time, “but it doesn’t mean that some other company would actually be able to crack into this acquisition. There is still a substantial barrier to entry for building a GPS satellite.”

Circumstances Shift
Whoever bids on Phase 2 will be competing to provide spacecraft to an Air Force whose operational environment has sharply changed in just the last several years.

In April 2016, not quite a year after the Air Force released its Phase 1 RFP and month before the Phase 1 winners were revealed, Gen. John Hyten, then the commander of Air Force Space Command, announced the Space Enterprise Vision (SEV). The SEV framed how programs across the full range of military space activities were to take action to meet the threat posed by a more space-capable China and Russia

“In the recent past, the United States enjoyed unchallenged freedom of action in the space domain,” Hyten said in a statement formally announcing SEV. “Most U.S. military space systems were not designed with threats in mind, and were built for long-term functionality and efficiency, with systems operating for decades in some cases. Without the need to factor in threats, longevity and cost were the critical factors to design and these factors were applied in a mission stovepipe. This is no longer an adequate methodology to equip space forces.”

China became a particular focus of concern in 2007 after the nation used an anti-satellite missile (an ASAT) to destroy one of its own spacecraft, an aging weather satellite in low Earth orbit. And defense officials have made clear China is working hard to expand its military capabilities in space.

“The PLA (People’s Liberation Army) is acquiring a range of technologies to improve China’s counter-space capabilities,” the Department of Defense (DoD) said in its annual report to Congress on military and security developments in China. China was working on directed-energy weapons and satellite jammers, DoD wrote, and navigation satellites were among the targets suggested in Chinese PLA writings.

“The potential adversaries we have around the world know very well how important space is to us and how important it is to our alliances and to our partners and how we would operate and fight,” confirmed Deborah Lee James, who served as secretary of the Air Force from December 2013 to January 2017.

China has been watching and learning from U.S. space operations for the last 25 years, James told a September 6 symposium on organizing military space.

“They’ve not been sitting still when it comes to investing and testing capabilities which ultimately could threaten our ability to be able to use space, our space assets, in the event of conflict,” she told the audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In addition to the ASAT test in 2007, she said, China in 2013 tested a direct-ascent, anti-satellite system that could reach geosynchronous orbit — where key military satellites reside. Both China and Russia have also demonstrated their ability to do robotic rendezvous and proximity operations and, James told the audience, a year or two ago a Russian satellite showed an unusual pattern of movements in GEO orbit including loitering near several U.S. commercial communications satellites.

“Space is no longer a peaceful domain if it ever was one,” said James. “It is now contested and congested.”

Must Go Faster
“In the not-too-distant future, they (the Chinese) will be able to use that capability to threaten every spacecraft we have in space. We have to prevent that, and the best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war,” Hyten told an audience in January at Stanford University in California, according to a DoD summary. “So, the United States is going to do that, and we’re going to make sure that everybody knows we’re prepared for war.”

Now the commander of United States Strategic Command, Hyten is pushing the service to make that happen. Though America still enjoys a significant advantage in space, he told the Washington Free Beacon, that advantage is eroding and space defense requires moving much more quickly than the Pentagon’s acquisitions processes currently allow.

“Can we go fast enough as a nation to stay ahead of our adversaries?” Hyten said in an interview. “We have to go fast.”

That sense of urgency was underscored in an SEV-related Sources Sought announcement posted August 30 by Air Force Space Command.

Defense officials reached out to determine what systems engineering and integration (SE&I) services industry had available to support, among other activities “new and on-going efforts in all phases of the acquisition life cycle and standardize systems engineering processes.” The eventual contractor would work on three programs: the Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN), the Launch and Test Range System (LTRS), and the Space Training Acquisition Office (STAO). Though not specific to the GPS III RFI, the work would cover a long list of mission areas including navigation satellites, next generation space navigation systems, navigation user equipment and satellite ground stations among its mission areas.

“The purpose of this Synopsis is to gain insight into existing Industry capabilities and systems,” Space Command wrote. “It is aimed at receiving feedback from industry on the capabilities out there to perform SE&I support within a diminished timeline due to the urgency of this Space Enterprise Vision (SEV) requirement directed from Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) leadership.”

The Air Force may also be looking at other ways to speed up replenishment of the GPS constellation in a pinch. On July 31 Space Command posted a Special Notice asking for feedback on reducing the design life of the GPS satellites. Shorter-lived spacecraft can be made smaller, perhaps enabling more than one satellite to be launched per spacecraft. Though the July 31 notice asked for ideas for the generation of satellites after GPS III, the notion of building smaller GPS satellites has been discussed for years. Quick replenishment is one way to address the risk of losing satellites and also a way to update the constellation with important new technology.

In fact, the current GPS III work schedule, according to Gleckel, specifically incorporates “tech insertion points” aimed, at least in part, at adapting to the new, contested nature of space operations.

“That’s where we can add additional capabilities into a future flow,” Gleckel said during his presentation. “Again, with the same contractor without starting over, without the costs and time that go along with that — but still allowing us to change with the threats.” 

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Federal budgeteers have made clear their support for satellite navigation though problems with military space programs in general, and GPS programs in particular, have lawmakers working to shake up the Pentagon’s management structure and put limits on new federal business to contractors whose projects go awry.

So far members of Congress have largely approved full GPS funding despite delays impacting the space, ground and user equipment segments. As of press time, congressional authorizers were further along in their work with the full House passing H.R. 2810, their version of the FY18 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The Senate Armed Services Committee moved its version of the NDAA out of committee on July 14 and sent it to the full Senate for a vote.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense passed its 2018 Defense Appropriations bill and the full committee sent it to the House for approval June 29. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense has held hearings but has not yet approved a bill.

The Big Picture
Throughout this process both Republican lawmakers and the White House have been basing their budgets on their mutual belief that the Defense Department needs more resources than it has been getting. Though they agree on the problem they have yet to agree on a level of funding to fix it.

The President asked for $574 billion for the Department of Defense base budget —an amount exceeded by every congressional budget bill so far.

Looking just at the overall defense totals the House NDAA authorized $631 billion in discretionary defense spending (the base budget) while the Senate set a level of $640 billion. The full House Appropriations Committee reported out a bill with total discretionary defense spending of $584 billion while the non-binding House Budget Committee’s 10-year spending plan set the amount at $622 for fiscal year 2018. None of these numbers include the tens of millions budgeted separately for ongoing conflicts — that is funding listed under the account for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)/Global War on Terrorism.

While certainly consistent, all this enthusiasm is not anchored in reality. The congressionally approved spending caps created by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) are still in place. Though Congress has tweaked the numbers over the last six years, the defense funding cap for fiscal year 2018 is $549 billion — $25 billion to some $91 billion less than what is being proposed.

“It all sounds real good but sequestration is still the law of the land,” said former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James on the July 16 broadcast of Government Matters.

Moreover, while there appears to be broad bipartisan agreement that sequestration caps should be eased, the Democrats have been insisting that a defense spending boost needs to be accompanied by a bump-up in non-defense spending, something Republicans have generally opposed. There is no clear mechanism to change that dynamic.

“As I talk to people on Capitol Hill I’m still not seeing a path forward to lift sequestration,” said James. “Ultimately if sequestration does not get lifted then we’re back to square one and all of this talk is, indeed, just talk. Sequestration must be lifted.”

The Numbers So Far
Given the sequestration dilemma it is possible, even likely, that the amounts approved for GPS will change. Even so it seems clear from their funding choices that lawmakers understand and appreciate GPS and are more likely to make it a priority, even in a budget squeeze.

For example, House appropriators shaved the administration’s budget request of $1.09 billion by just $30.0 million — $20.0 million of that from the $243.4 million request for GPS III development and $10.0 million from the $253.9 million request for user equipment. The Defense Department asked for, and got, $510.9 million for development work on the Next Generation Operational Control System (OCX) and the GPS Enterprise Integrator.

The House Appropriations Committee also approved the request for $85.9 million for GPS III procurement, concurring with the DoD’s decision to delay procurement of the eleventh of the new GPS III satellites until after the Air Force has decided on how to proceed with the GPS III follow-on contract. Lawmakers do not want to push things off too long, however, and said in the report accompanying the bill that it “expects the Secretary of the Air Force to request procurement funds in fiscal year 2019 for the acquisition of space vehicles 11 and 12.”

The authorizing committees in both the House and Senate agreed with the appropriator’s approach and approved $85.9 million for GPS III procurement. They also fully funded the request for the OCX program.

They inserted money to speed the slow procurement of Military GPS User Equipment (MGUE). The House authorizers added $10.0 million to the administration’s request and the Senate $98.5 million. The Senate authorizers also slipped another $40.3 million into the pot for development of GPS III including the Search & Rescue Payload and work on a new M-Code Hosted Payload.

The bump ups in authorized spending are really just a wish list of sorts unless there is a matching appropriation. The authorizers have a lot more clout, however, when it comes to setting policy and they aimed that clout squarely at both the Air Force and at those members of the contracting community whose space programs are running less than smoothly. It’s easy to understand why.

The Military Space Problem
Though news reports have detailed delays in one program or cost overruns in another, it is harder to follow outcomes across the entire military space portfolio, especially when budgets and schedules get re-baselined. But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has been keeping track — and the books don’t look good.

According to a June presentation by Cristina Chaplain, who leads GAO’s oversight of military space programs, only one of the nine programs she discussed is not either over budget or years behind schedule.

For the total the Air Force portfolio, not including the Joint Strike Fighter, acquisition costs run about 30 percent above their first estimates. For space programs, however, it’s about 60 percent, she told the June 16 Strategic National Security Space FY18 Budget Forum in Washington.

Congress is particularly concerned about the GPS programs, she told attendees. The new, cyber-toughened ground system (GPS OCX), is 53 percent over its initial budget estimate budget and 5-plus years behind schedule. The GPS III program is almost four years late and now expected to cost 35 percent more than originally projected. The MGUE program has been “very slow in getting that stuff rolled out,” she said.

“When you have the Army folks coming to GAO to tell you they need more centralized authority on user equipment, you know there’s an issue,” she said, referring to the MGUE program. “You don’t go to GAO unless something is wrong.”

On top of this, several programs need to be recapitalized and there are increasing threats to space assets that require even more funding, she said. Then “poor acquisition outcomes drain the money that you have to pay for this stuff.”

Space Corps
To help address these problems the House proposed in June to establish a U.S. Space Command and create a new Space Corps under the command of the Air Force Secretary, but separate from the Air Force. The role of the principal DoD space advisor and the Defense Space Council would be abolished and a new chief of staff of the Space Corps would be appointed. That person, who would be a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and would report directly to the Secretary of the Air Force, would serve for six years.

Under this approach there would be also be a subordinate unified command called Space Command established under the United States Strategic Command — one of the Pentagon’s nine unified commands.

If this measure — which faces substantial opposition — is approved, the new structure would need to be in place by Jan. 1, 2019. And lawmakers want reports on the implementation plan by March 1 and Aug. 1 of 2018.

Senate Armed Services approached the problem differently splitting the current job of the DoD’s Chief Information Officer. The business functions would stay with the CIO but a new Chief Information War Officer would take over defense-wide information war-fighting functions including: 1) Space and space launch systems; (2) Communications networks and information technology (other than business systems); (3) National Security Systems; (4) Information assurance and cybersecurity; (5) Electronic warfare and cyber warfare; (6) Nuclear command and control and senior leadership communications systems; (7) Command and control systems and networks; (8) The electromagnetic spectrum — and, (9) Positioning, navigation, and timing.

The need for change is clear, the senators said in their report.

“With respect to space, numerous studies over the past two decades have exposed issues with the programmatic decision-making that is fragmented across more than 60 offices in the Department of Defense,” they wrote. Funding for space programs within the Air Force is also near 30-year lows, while the threats and our reliance on space are at their highest and growing. The Air Force was also unable to prioritize and fund $772.0 million worth of space priorities in its fiscal year 2018 budget request, opting instead to include those requirements on an unfunded priorities list.”

The Senate committee does not propose taking Space Command out from under the Air Force, but it does want the commanders to stay there a while and apply their expertise. If approved the head of Space Command would hold the job for six years.

Senate authorizers also want to ratchet up the pressure on contractors to improve outcomes by limiting new federal business for firms that miss their targets.

The legislation would have the Air Force create a “watch list of contractors with a history of poor performance on space procurement or research, development, test, and evaluation program contracts.” The commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center would be responsible for the list and have discretion to list or delist a firm or a particular division of a company. There are other reasons to land on the list — including financial concerns; felony or civil judgments; and security or foreign ownership and control issues — but being put on the watch list is not supposed to be considered de facto suspension or debarment, the report said. Being listed means the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center could not “solicit an offer from, award a contract to, execute an engineering change proposal with, or exercise an option on any Air Force space program” with that firm without prior approval of the Center’s commander.

The measure could impact many, if not most, firms in the GPS contractor community depending on how far back the performance history goes. The Air Force has been quite clear about its frustrations with Lockheed Martin’s work on the first tranche of GPS III satellites, and positively fuming about Raytheon’s problems with OCX. The provision also could be particularly impactful if, for example, a company that struggled with a GPS contract suddenly finds itself limited in pursuing future remote sensing satellite or communication satellite work and vice versa.

Building Resiliency
Recognizing that the military is reliant on Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT), the Senate authorizers also want the DoD to deploy an alternate source of time and location as a way to boost PNT resilience. This backup, which lawmakers want to deliver UTC time globally, should be space-based, they said. PNT managers could use the DoD and/or commercial systems to get it running “rapidly and at reduced cost.”

There are several services that might be able to do that for the U.S. military including Europe’s soon-to-be-completed Galileo constellation and the Satelles services offered on the Iridium constellation. Satelles is certainly pitching to the Pentagon and the DoD has been seeking access to Galileo’s Public Regulated Service (PRS) signal for some time. In fact there has been extensive work done to make Galileo signals both compatible and interoperable with GPS.

A measure in the House defense authorization bill, however, could complicate finding a space-based backup if left in the final language by congressional conferees.

The House wants to amend current law to bar the Pentagon from using satellite services provided by any organization that launched their satellite(s) on launch vehicles built, provided or launched by a “covered” country. The measure adds Russia to the list of covered countries and notes that it does not matter where the launch actually takes place. The prohibition, therefore, would certainly seem to include Soyuz rocket launches from the Arianespace Spaceport in French Guiana.

The legislation applies only to deals going forward. While both Galileo and Satelles appear to be relying on American or European launchers for the immediate future, they have used Russian launchers in the past. If approved the language could give suppliers pause if they have to forgo using Russian launchers in the future for satellite replacement.

Other Measures
In addition to finding a global backup the House encouraged the Pentagon to expand cooperation with Japan. The Committee wants a report from both the DoD and the State Department on U.S. Japanese cooperation by December 1 of this year.

The House also wants a previously ordered report on PNT resiliency in the United States. In addition, the House Committee on Armed Services wants a briefing by this December 15 on the risks associated with GPS disruptions “that could affect defense of the homeland and other defense activities in the United States.”

That briefing is supposed to cover the requirements for PNT reliability and redundancy for military operations in the United States, an analysis of the extent to which homeland defense operations rely on accurate PNT signals from GPS, and an assessment of alternative sources of PNT.

On a separate note, the Senate Armed Services Committee directed the Army and the Air Force to conduct large-scale, joint exercises to work through interoperability issues.

“Large-scale, joint training exercises that stress interoperability across domains,” they wrote, “are a vital part of establishing and maintaining military readiness for conflicts involving near-peer competitors.”

To get the ball rolling the bill would require a report from the Secretary of Defense within six months detailing what exercises involving air and land domains already exist and the DoD’s plans for expanding them and developing new ones — including where those new exercises might be held. The senators specifically want the planners to allow the room for the “robust use of the electromagnetic spectrum, including global positioning system (GPS), atmospheric, and communications-jamming.”

The post GPS Funding Comes with Strong Support — and Strings Attached appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

Though the United States has been working on a backup for GPS for years, and was actually close to completing an equipment update to that end in 2009, Europe may be the first to put in place a fully independent alternative for positioning and timing data — an economic insurance policy against satellite navigation signals being jammed or disrupted.

Led by the United Kingdom, the Europeans are weighing how to deal with the vulnerabilities created by relying solely on signals from GNSS. As in the U.S. their options include recycling their old Loran C navigation sites to support an enhanced Loran (eLoran) service as a backup for GPS and Galileo. 

“There is a very increased focus on GNSS resiliency at the moment,” said an expert familiar with the issue. “A number of countries in Europe are working towards PNT (position, navigation and timing) strategies,” the source said, adding that “there’s a lot of discussion about PNT in the round — not just GNSS.”

The European Commission (EC) is funding a study in support of a European radionavigation plan, said the source, and that study discusses the need for resilient PNT and looks at using terrestrial systems as well as space-based signals. The European Space Agency is also taking a broader perspective in its new navigation program, describing its new endeavor as a PNT effort, not a GNSS one, and putting a strong emphasis on hybrid systems, said the expert.

U.K. Initiatives
Feeding into those broad European efforts are two PNT-focused studies in the U.K., including a Blackett Review at the highest levels.

Sir Mark Walport, the U.K.’s Government Chief Scientific Adviser, is conducting the review, which should be completed by the end of this year, several sources, told Inside GNSS. All of those who described the work asked for anonymity to be able to discuss it freely. 

The Blackett team is looking at how dependent critical services are on GNSS and, therefore, how vulnerable they would be to GNSS disruption. The study springs from an earlier Blackett Review which recommended looking more closely at timing data, a course of work that was later expanded to include position and navigation. 

The review will incorporate the results of a separate but related study looking at the fiscal consequences of a GNSS disruption in the U.K.

“It just looks squarely at the economic impacts,” said one of the experts. 

Together, said one of the sources, the two studies will give a well-rounded view of the PNT-related economic and technical challenges faced by the U.K. including critical infrastructure dependencies. Perhaps more importantly, they will also look at possible solutions.

The Blackett Review will include recommendations, the source said, which could range from doing additional studies or developing a strategy to boosting funding in a particular area. The recommendations are quite high level, they said, but carry a lot of weight. 

“The recommendations are effectively from the government’s chief science adviser,” the source explained.

“That is a very powerful person to stand up and say we need to do this or we need to do that.”

The format of the Blackett Review may be especially useful. It is a type of study that follows a set process of analysis and presentation aimed at supporting government policymakers. 

“Awareness of the vulnerability of GPS, and of GNSS grows stronger,” said another source. “It’s almost complete amongst engineers but the difficulty is that it’s only patchy amongst politicians.” 

Depending on the findings the U.K. may move quickly to implement some of those solutions, an expert said. One of the options that could be suggested is the implementation of eLoran — though that is not a course of action Great Britain can undertake on its own. 

Dry and Warm
The eLoran system, which the British have been demonstrating at their Anthorn site, sends out powerful, low-frequency signals using terrestrial transmitters that do not have the same vulnerabilities as space-based systems to space weather or future on-orbit conflicts. The system is widely considered to be a promising backup for GPS, particularly for timing data.

“It’s delivering, certainly, a microsecond,” said David Last, a radionavigation expert following the Anthorn tests. “We are aiming for 100 nanoseconds service in due course and that will require a differential operation — but the substantial market is for a microsecond at the moment.”

“eLoran has a very stable frequency output, a frequency available because it’s based on three atomic clocks on the stations just like GPS has three atomic clocks in the satellite,” added Charles “Chuck” Schue, the co-founder, president and CEO of UrsaNav, which provides eLoran technology. UrsaNav has been working with the Harris Corp. and the U.S. government through a Cooperative Research And Development Agreement (CRADA) to test eLoran as a wide-area timing source in the United States. Schue is also a co-owner of Taviga with Charles Curry of Chronos Technology Ltd. Taviga supports low frequency PNT in Europe including eLoran. More information here.

Both the U.S. and Europe have a system of old Loran C stations that could be converted into eLoran stations. Unlike the U.S., which has removed the equipment and towers from the majority of its sites, the Europeans have been keeping their sites in working condition until a final decision on eLoran is made. 

There are five European nations with Loran sites. The U.K., Germany and Denmark each have one site, France has two (though one source expressed concern one had been shut down) and Norway has three. Norway did have four sites, but dropped its northernmost station. 

With the exception of that one Norwegian site, Schue said he believed the European Loran stations were being kept “dry and warm” — that is they are generally not operating but the power was still on. The Germans have repurposed their site for another kind of service but not one that would conflict with eLoran, said Schue, so a multi-purpose broadcast site remains possible. 

The U.K. has taken a collaborative approach in addressing eLoran’s potential, Schue told Inside GNSS. The U.K. hosted a meeting attended by the other Loran-equipped nations and potential eLoran users. The British are working with these countries to see if they can get back to where they were with the Northern European Loran system, Schue said, to provide “at least timing and frequency backup across their various coverage areas and possibly even positioning, depending on which nations and stations want to play.”

Though the U.K. work seems to be moving smoothly there have been notable, nontechnical disruptions. It is unclear, for example, how the U.K.’s exit from the European Union (EU) will impact future cooperation and the rules of the June 8 U.K. election, which was still on the horizon at press time, required that British officials not make decisions, release study results or speak publicly. On top of that, should the U.K. government change hands there also likely will be transition-related delays.

In fact, there is at least one important personnel change already in the works. Sir Walport was recently tapped to lead the U.K. Research and Innovation (UKRI). Hopefully that shift will not delay the Blackett Review too much. Walport is to continue with the study, said one person familiar with the work, and his replacement will likely co-chair the research. 

Stuck
Meanwhile, across the pond in the United States, efforts to set up a GPS backup remain mired in studies. 

The U.S. is now roughly a year and a half into an effort to establish requirements for a GPS backup system. This followed an extensive research effort in 2014, which was itself a follow-up to a three-year study completed roughly seven years earlier. 

According to a Dec. 7, 2016 presentation by Jim Platt, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s PNT Office, to the National Space-Based PNT Advisory Board, the validation of the timing requirements for critical infrastructure should be completed by September. 

Meeting the end-of-year deadline for the comprehensive and extensive report now being developed will be difficult, said Dana Goward, the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. “And then I imagine after that they’re going to have to do an analysis of alternatives, which I’m expecting is going to be nearly a repeat of what has been done before. They look at all the available technologies and compare them against each other and see which is the best compliment and backup system for GPS. My guess is …they will probably again find that eLoran is the best, if not the only, wide area compliment and backup system that is available. But that’s something that they have to grind through and all of that grinding through is going to take some time I’m sure.” 

Though the technology has not improved or changed significantly since earlier studies, Goward said the people in the administration feel this is the path they are compelled to pursue. 

“That said,” Goward told Inside GNSS, “we are hoping that some people at the political level will begin to understand this challenge better and perhaps take greater notice of the previous work that’s been done and shorten the process.”

In fact, a new bill was introduced in Congress May 18 with provisions mandating that the Secretary of Transportation work with the Commandant of the Coast Guard to establish eLoran as a backup for GPS in the United States. Among other things the new system would have to be wireless, terrestrial, synchronized with coordinated universal time, and able to penetrate underground and inside buildings — all characteristics of eLoran. 

Introduced by Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., an established supporter of eLoran, bill H.R. 2518 would require the Department of Transportation secretary to deliver a plan to lawmakers to establish such a system within three years — “subject to the availability of appropriations.”

That’s quite a proviso given that it’s been a lack of appropriations that has been holding up deployment of eLoran in the U.S. for years. 

A plan to deploy eLoran, the culmination of that three-year study, was first announced in 2008 by the Department of Homeland Security. With some $160 million in upgrades to the old sites nearly completed, DHS wanted to move the Coast Guard —which was and is responsible for Loran — to the National Protection and Programs Directorate or NPPD, which was in charge of infrastructure protection, according to Goward. The transfer was stalled, however, because DHS put the enacting language in its budget proposal and Congress failed to get it passed, resorting to a continuing resolution instead. The program was then cut on the recommendation of the Office of Management and Budget, which made a last minute change to President Obama’s first budget to showcase the White House’s ability to find savings. Despite loud protests the money for Loran C stayed cut, effectively killing eLoran in the process. Promises to restore the program were never fulfilled, according to Goward.

A more detailed summary of what happened can be found on the Foundation’s website.

Though Congress eventually ordered the sites preserved pending a final eLoran decision, the lawmakers were too slow to save the infrastructure. The Coast Guard was ordered to dismantle the sites and didn’t have the funding to do otherwise. They efficiently emptied the majority of the 25 sites, largely flushing the $160 million in upgrades in the process. 

It wasn’t their fault, said Schue. “They did the best they could.” 

Now, said Schue, “there’s only eight sites in the contiguous U.S. that still have antennas up and then at all the other sites the antennas are down both here in the U.S. and in Canada. Canada followed our lead and took their towers down. At most of the stations the technology has been taken out and disposed of including in some cases the generators, you know transformers, air conditioners — those kinds of things.”

New eLoran Standards
There is one bright spot amidst the tangle of delays and equipment loss — the launch of a new, formal development process for international eLoran standards. 

Loran C never had a classic set of standards to govern the development of receivers and other equipment; it operated under an instruction from the Commandant of the Coast Guard. SAE International, a professional association and standards development organization with over 127,000 members worldwide, has elected to change that.

The SAE Aerospace Council is taking on standards development for eLoran equipment as part of the work of a new committee devoted to position, navigation and timing standards. Committee AS-5, which is under the Aerospace Avionic Systems Group chaired by Bill Woodward, met for the first time in May. 

The group did two things at its inaugural meeting, said Woodward, who works for the Virginia firm Geodesicx. It took the commandant’s instruction and converted it into a Word document for publication as an SAE standard. “That’s not going to change,” he said, “It’s just going to say that now there is a standard for what we used to call Loran C.” 

They also launched work on an Interface Control Document for eLoran. This contains the kind information necessary to build transmitters and receivers and Woodward said he hoped to have it published in 90 days — that is by roughly the end of August. In addition, the committee is writing an AIR or Aerospace Information Report on eLoran, which aims to address any misperceptions by publishing accurate information and thereby creating a common foundation for discussion. 

According to AS-5’s Work In Progress list there are another three other documents under development — so it’s no surprise that Woodward is looking for technical experts to join the committee.

“We have different types of members within a committee,” he said including mailing list recipients and liaisons. “The liaisons can actually access documents and download them.” 

Voting members, who should be able to contribute technical expertise to the committee’s work, attend three meetings in a row, making it an 18-month process to become a voting member. Continued good attendance is necessary to maintain a voting membership. 

Woodward may be hoping that the establishment of AS-5 and formal standards can ease the development of eLoran systems as well as new eLoran equipment. 

“The feedback I was getting from folks is that every time they talk to Congress, people always say: ‘Where’s the standard?’ ” Woodward told Inside GNSS. “You really can’t build anything unless you have a standard.”

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The GPS community and Virginia-based Ligado are weighing new and upcoming test results as the standoff over interference with satellite navigation services enters its seventh year.

The dispute centers on the company’s now modified proposal to build a terrestrial wireless network supported by frequencies originally allocated for satellites. Though there had been a move some years earlier to augment the satellite services with ground stations the company’s first plan envisioned some 30,000 high-powered ground terminals.

The GPS community and Virginia-based Ligado are weighing new and upcoming test results as the standoff over interference with satellite navigation services enters its seventh year.

The dispute centers on the company’s now modified proposal to build a terrestrial wireless network supported by frequencies originally allocated for satellites. Though there had been a move some years earlier to augment the satellite services with ground stations the company’s first plan envisioned some 30,000 high-powered ground terminals.

Ligado’s frequencies neighbor the band relied upon by GPS and tests in 2011 showed the proposed network would overload the vast majority of GPS receivers. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put the project on hold early in 2012 and the company filed bankruptcy not long thereafter. It reorganized, emerging from Chapter 11 late in 2015 and soon changed its name from LightSquared to Ligado. It modified its network plan, but deep concerns over GPS interference continued.

Since exiting bankruptcy Ligado has been pressing the FCC for approval to build its network. Last year it poured more than $1.5 million into lobbying, according to filings with the Lobbying Disclosure Act database, and it funded studies of its own aimed at convincing the FCC to pull the broadband plan off the back burner.

The Results Are In
Ligado hired two technical organizations — Roberson and Associates, a telecommunications engineering firm, and the federal government’s National Advanced Spectrum and Communications Test Network (NASCTN).

Roberson released a study in May 2016 that, despite efforts to put the outcome in the best light, showed that Ligado’s broadband signals would impact several different GPS receivers. In December 2016, a summary of another Roberson test on signal reacquisition times, posted on the FCC docket by Ligado without comment, also showed impacts to some receivers.

Ligado used Roberson’s research to press for a change in the way interference is assessed. They had the firm measure position error as well as the carrier-to-noise-density ratio (C/N₀). Changes in the signal-to-noise ratio are the internationally accepted metric for determining levels of interference. Ligado asserted that position error was a better choice — a proposal that has, so far, failed to gain traction.

“Roberson’s use of measures of harmful interference other than the established standard of a 1 dB increase in the noise floor is not appropriate, as the record before the FCC amply demonstrates,” said Jim Kirkland, general counsel and vice-president of Trimble in a statement issued in response to the May 2016 Roberson test results. “Precision GNSS products like Trimble’s control important processes such as construction machine guidance at a level of precision that cannot be reliably observed by Roberson’s tests.” See here.

Using position error would favor Ligado’s signals and allow damaging levels of interference to GPS receivers, said Logan Scott, a GPS signal expert and a consultant specializing in radio frequency signal processing and waveform design for communications, navigation, and other systems. GPS receivers can give accurate position information even when experiencing serious interference, he explained in an interview last year. As long as they are tracking satellites they can provide fairly accurate positioning information right up to the point where the interference causes them to lose their lock on the satellite.

Though Ligado continues to press for a position error standard at least one expert thinks the matter is settled.

Tim Farrar, a technology consultant specializing in the satellite industry who has followed the Ligado saga closely, believes the firm has failed to persuade decision makers that position error is the better metric.

“They’ve lost that argument,” Farrar told Inside GNSS.

NASCTN Reports
Ligado’s project with the NASCTN also incorporated position error. NASCTN is a national network of federal, academic, and commercial test facilities formed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

NASCTN’s self-described mission to accelerate deployment of wireless technologies raised doubts about its impartiality when the tests were announced — doubts that sharpened when it became clear Ligado, and not NASCTN, was crafting the research questions. Among the issues the project was designed to examine was the “preference” for using changes in C/N₀ over other measures, including position error, to evaluate interference.

The work got off to a controversial start with a test plan that was developed with limited input and then sprung on the GPS community — which then had just a few days over a weekend to provide feedback. NASCTN said at the time, however, that “to preserve its neutrality,” it would provide robust test methodologies and validated measurement data but “not make policy recommendations based on this data.” Moreover, NASCTN told Inside GNSS that it would “not make any policy-related interpretations associated with the test data,” although it “will likely make recommendations about testing methods.” See here.

The group released a 428-page report in February, describing its work and the tests it developed. As promised they are also making the data available. A request form for the data CD and a link to the report are here.

“They did a very competent job,” said Scott, who noted that their conclusions, as promised, were focused on the tests themselves. “Their conclusion was that you needed a high level of automation to conduct these tests.”

Damages
Scott reviewed the report and found the data in its charts was “pretty much consistent” with the Roberson tests, the tests done by the Technical Working Group (TWG) in 2011 that first clarified the levels of interference and the initial results of the Adjacent-Band Compatibility (ABC) Assessment now being conducted by the Department of Transportation (DoT).

“Basically what they’re showing is, you start transmitting high-power next to GPS, you’re going to damage national infrastructure,” Scott told Inside GNSS.

Scott’s perspective is in stark contrast to the interpretation put forth by Ligado, in a February 24 letter to the FCC. (Interestingly, the letter described the NASCTN project simply as a “Government study” and did not mention the firm’s sponsorship.)

“This comprehensive 428-page study that involved 1,476 hours of testing,” they wrote, validates the conclusion reached by the major GPS companies over the last 14 months: An LTE network operating within the specifications proposed in Ligado’s pending FCC applications will not harm the performance of GPS devices.”

Scott vehemently disagrees with the interpretation. “The report does not say that and the report actually provides quite a bit of evidence that (the network) will cause harm. How they reached this conclusion from this report is just beyond me because the data in the report very clearly shows damage.”

The difference in views appears to hinge on Ligado’s continued assertion that position error is the appropriate yardstick for interference.

“The government study found no impact on the position and timing accuracy of many GPS devices when exposed to mid-band LTE signals at significantly higher power than they would be under Ligado’s proposal,” the Feb. 24 letter said. The charts in the study, they continued, “illustrate that the study confirms Ligado’s prior submission in the record that a 1 dB-Hz decrease in the carrier-to-noise-density ratio (C/N₀) is not the appropriate standard for assessing harm to GPS receivers.”

Charts 6.24 and 6.28 from the study, however, show several of the receivers losing satellite lock as the signal power increases though it is not possible to determine which devices those are. The study lists the receivers tested, but it does so in such a way that specific results cannot be attributed to a specific piece of equipment.

Scott pointed out that the geographic impact of the network’s signals, based on the study’s data in Figure 6.24, could be substantial.

“So what kind of range is associated with that at the powers you’re talking about?” said Scott. “You’re talking about something of the order of 5 kilometers. So, you turn on a Ligado base station and 5 kilometers away there are high-precision receivers that are dying. And I don’t just mean degrading, I mean dying. Dead. Unable to operate.”

Scott explained that his conclusion is not based on NASCTN data, as NASCTN did not measure for such impacts, but on data from the TWG — the cadre of researchers who first looked at the LightSquared/GPS interference issue in 2011. Those researchers conducted tests at the same signal power that Ligado is now proposing, he said. To compare the two sets of data he annotated a chart based on TWG part 4 measured signal strength with boxes based on data from the NASCTN report. High-precision “receivers could experience total failure at ranges > 4 kilometers,” he said.

Scott noted also that there are reference receivers among the devices tested and that position error measurements would not reflect damaging interference to those receivers.

“The measure of a reference receiver is not its location performance; it knows exactly where it is,” Scott said. “The measure of its performance is how many satellites it’s tracking and how accurately it’s tracking the satellites. Looking through the test results I’m seeing all kinds of degradation. I’m seeing situations where they just flat out kill the receiver.”

The Adjacent-Band Assessment
The results from what, potentially, could be the most impactful study, however, are yet to come.

The ABC Assessment is a two-phase effort to determine the power limits by frequency, that is the interference tolerance masks (ITM) needed to protect both existing and future GPS receivers. The ABC Assessment is looking at a range of receivers and was developed with significant community input, including input from Ligado, which has been unhappy with the fact that it relies on C/N₀.

The first round of results, released in October, confirmed that cell phone receivers were the least sensitive and high-precision receivers the most sensitive, which tracks with earlier tests. Interestingly the masks developed for certified aviation receivers, which would seem likely to be restrictive, were not enough to protect other kinds of receivers. See here.

The ABC Assessment is “very conservative and therefore going to be pretty difficult [for Ligado] in terms of the power limits that are going to be imposed on the transmitters,” said Farrar. “…Obviously Ligado would, presumably, hope the FCC would just agree to the limits that Ligado proposed previously. But [Ligado’s proposed limits] are not likely to be viewed particularly positively [if the DoT is much more conservative].”

As of press time, the second round of data from the ABC Assessment was set to be released March 30. More details on the Global Positioning System Adjacent Band Compatibility Assessment can be found online here.

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Already above Earth’s atmosphere, Ariane’s aerodynamic fairing is jettisoned and the four Galileo satellites “see” space for the first time. ESA photo.

The European Commission (EC) reached out to the U.S. State Department at the end of 2013 to request an exemption from the requirement. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) assessed the request from its perspective as the manager of the federal uses of frequencies. It found that the Galileo signals were compatible with government systems including the GPS L1 and L5 signals in the 1559-1610 MHz and 1164-1300 MHz RNSS bands.

NTIA, on behalf of the executive branch, then forwarded the request to the FCC in January 2015. It said the proposal met all its criteria and recommended approval saying the waiver was in the public interest.

FCC regulators appear to agree.

“We emphasize at the outset that we agree with NTIA that authorizing the use of Galileo signals has the potential to bring significant benefits to the American public, such as improvements in the availability, reliability, and resiliency of space-based PNT services,” the FCC wrote in its January 6, 2017 request for comment. “In this Public Notice, we seek to fully develop a record on these potential benefits, and the ways in which our grant of a waiver would serve the public interest.”

The benefits are clear, stressed the majority of those filing comments.

“A second constellation can be used to detect spoofing,” Michael Ritter, president of Hexagon Positioning Intelligence, wrote in his comments. “It may not be able to confirm which constellation is being spoofed, but the inter-comparisons can detect that something is not right and alert the user to proceed with caution.”

Two constellations worth of satellites and an increased number of usable signals will increase the availability of positioning information when the view of the sky is limited —such as at the ends of a field where there are more likely to be trees and other obstructions, wrote CNH Industrial, which makes construction and precision agricultural equipment.

“The most critical factor in getting a fix is visibility to the receiver of an adequate number of GNSS satellites,” confirmed Broadcom, a global semiconductor company headquartered in Irvine, Calif. “This is difficult in urban conditions where much of the sky may be blocked.”

Galileo signals improve the chances of getting a high-quality fix even under challenging conditions, the maker of semiconductor chips said. “In the case of 911 services these factors can have life or death consequences.”

It is those life or death instances that were the focus of comments by NENA, the 9-1-1 Association.

“With mobile callers now accounting for more than 75 percent of 9-1-1 calls in many jurisdictions, ensuring the availability of RNSS-derived position fixes is vital to the continued success of wireless Enhanced 9-1-1, and the future Next Generation 9-1-1 ecosystem,” NENA wrote. “Granting the EC’s waiver request will provide a new tool that handset manufacturers can use to help reliably locate their customers in an emergency.”

NENA, public safety communications group APCO International and four of the wireless carriers had proposed in 2014 to use GLONASS to enhance the ability of first responders to locate those needing help. That proposal was thwarted by the need to get FCC authorization.

“Supporting multiple RNSS (Radio Navigation Satellite Services) systems benefits consumers by increasing the number of satellite vehicles that may be ‘in view’ from any given location. This increases the probability that a smartphone will be able to obtain a fix, particularly in challenging environments such as indoors or in densely-forested areas,” NENA wrote in support of the waiver.

Moreover, they said, even when a fix with one system is possible, having “multiple systems provides an independent source of location data that can prove vital in resolving position ambiguities or detecting error conditions in the primary system.”

NENA pointed out that full modernization of the GPS systems was “subject to an indefinite delay” because of issues with deploying the new GPS ground system. Because the Galileo system is being deployed at a rapid pace … the practical availability of these improved signals may sooner be obtained for users of Galileo receivers than for users of GPS-only receivers. “Whether for nearer-term availability of real-time position-based routing, or for reductions in position uncertainty, there is no doubt that the availability of Galileo RNSS signals for emergency calling purposes will improve consumer outcomes over the long term,” NENA added.

Inmarsat Concerns
Normally the organization asking for a change, in this case the European Commission, must adapt to the needs of existing spectrum users. Inmarsat in its comments raised a question about out-of-band interference from Galileo in the United States and opposed the request, seeking instead a full EC application that includes coordination to protect mobile satellite services (MSS).

The firm uses the band 1525-1559 MHz and it said Galileo’s Public Regulated Service (PRS) signal, which is located next door in the E1 band that runs from 1559-1591 MHz, poses an interference risk to all types of mobile earth stations (MES).

“Inmarsat is particularly concerned with the PRS signal,” the company wrote. “Without filtering, the level of the PRS signal in the MSS band is only a few dBs (decibels) below the PRS maximum (power) level. The waiver request does not address the level of filtering that Galileo would implement to ensure that the out-of-band emissions do not cause interference to MSS operations below 1559 MHz.”

Unfortunately, much of the data submitted in the annex to Inmarsat’s was redacted making it hard to fully describe the concerns.

The EC noted in its comments that Galileo has been transmitting its PRS signals in that band since 2006 “without reports of interference to systems operating in the band below 1559 MHz.”

Ligado
Another firm has a different type of interference concern. Ligado wants Galileo to ensure that it can withstand interference from below.

If the waiver is granted the FCC will be obligated to protect the use of the Galileo signal in the United States — a level of protection that is not required for unauthorized signals. In fact, most receiver firms already incorporate signals from Galileo and other constellations though they can’t expect those extra signals to be protected and those devices can’t be used for official purposes like emergency location.

The EC confirmed in its comments that the Galileo E1 signal will use 32 MHz from 1559-1591 MHz, a swath a bit wider than the 1563-1587 MHz used by GPS L1. While within the RNSS band and coordinated with GPS, that puts the Galileo E1 signal somewhat closer to the frequencies would-be broadband provider Ligado hopes to use.

Ligado (originally named LightSquared) asked the FCC back in 2010 to permit it to use spectrum originally allocated for satellites for a terrestrial broadband network incorporating thousands of high-powered ground stations. The plan was put on hold when tests found the new signals would overload a wide range of GPS receivers.

In 2012 the firm filed for bankruptcy, reemerging in 2015 to adopt a new name and propose a plan to reduce interference. Though the company has since worked out agreements with several GPS receiver firms and sponsored studies that it insists indicate compatibility, interference questions remain — including those raised by results from the first phase of a federal study called the Adjacent Band Compatibly Assessment.

Ligado asserted in its comments on Galileo that any adverse effects on adjacent services need to be addressed before the waiver is granted. “As the moving party, the EC is responsible for submitting evidence demonstrating the electromagnetic compatibility of Galileo-enabled devices with adjacent band devices, including those that Ligado seeks permission to operate.”

Though Ligado’s new service is not licensed, it is asking that its proposal not be complicated by having to address any interference issues raised by another, more closely located GNSS signal.

“It is incumbent upon the EC to demonstrate that the blanket authorization of Galileo devices for use within the United States will not cause interference to Ligado’s existing and anticipated operations adjacent to the E1 band,” the firm wrote. “In particular, the EC must demonstrate that the proposed Galileo operations will neither cause interference to MSS nor require additional interference protections from Ligado’s existing MSS or proposed ATC operations.”

Responses to this original round of comments are due March 23. The entire proceeding can be found in FCC docket 17-16.

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For the GPS community that business, at least in the near term, will likely center on changes in federal leadership — with many key appointments, like a new Secretary of the Air Force, still to be determined. In addition — even at this early stage when new lawmakers are still trying to find their offices — there are issues and opportunities worth watching in emerging legislation.

Washington has seen a lot of transitions, so even amidst political controversy it’s generally business as usual.

For the GPS community that business, at least in the near term, will likely center on changes in federal leadership — with many key appointments, like a new Secretary of the Air Force, still to be determined. In addition — even at this early stage when new lawmakers are still trying to find their offices — there are issues and opportunities worth watching in emerging legislation.

As the year kicks off the federal budget and the new administration’s spending plans are sure to be leading concerns for policy insiders. The government is roughly 90 days away from having to pass, finally, its fiscal year 2017 budget. The CR or continuing resolution — the short-term funding bill passed last year to keep the government from shutting down — expires at the end of April.

One of the goals of passing the CR at the end of last year was to give the incoming Trump administration an opportunity to impact the fiscal year 2017 budget. It is not clear how much Trump officials will be able to tweak the FY17 budget, but Donald Trump has said he wants to do away with defense spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act and to expand the military. His nominee for Secretary of Defense, retired U.S. Marine Corps General James Mattis, made it clear during his Senate confirmation hearing that he’d like to see Congress repeal the Act and its budget-strangling sequestration requirement and give the military more money to address growing demands on its resources.

During the January 12 hearing there appeared to be broad support for more military spending including from the Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.

“The President-elect has said he wants to ‘fully eliminate the defense sequester’ and ‘rebuild our military.’ If so, he will find many allies on this Committee,” McCain wrote in his opening remarks. “The Budget Control Act is harming us in ways that our enemies could only dream. We must repeal this legislation and increase the defense topline. This will not be cheap, but it pales in comparison to the cost of failing to deter a war, or worse, losing one.”

Not everyone in Congress is open to more spending, however, and one of the most strident budget cutters has now been nominated to oversee the federal purse.

Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-South Carolina, who Trump tapped as his budget director, has a record of fiercely supporting deep budget cuts and opposing efforts to raise the government’s debt limit. He has questioned the Pentagon’s approach to acquisitions and is one of the founders of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers whose budget stance helped pushed Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to resign.

Not only will any increases in DoD spending have to get past Mulvaney’s budget-hawk colleagues, they will be jockeying for funds in the midst of a scramble to both cut taxes and create jobs through infrastructure spending. Moreover, Congress will have to approve raising America’s debt ceiling in the next several months, an issue that has proved highly controversial in the past, even within the Republican Party.

Waiting
In the meantime, some elements of the GPS program are on hold. Specifically, there is unlikely to be another GPS III launch contract announcement until after the fiscal dust settles.

“We may not be able to award the contract while we’re under a CR,” said an Air Force spokesperson.

“I’m going to wait until we see the law come out. You’ve seen the marks that have been out in the language that’s there. We’ll look at how that plays with what we’ve got,” said Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the military deputy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. He spoke with reporters January 6 after an Air Force Association (AFA) breakfast.

The budget is not the only factor, said Bunch, who noted that they are working their way through the contract source selection process, but they want to see what happens with Congress.

“Hopefully when that language comes out — we’ll get everything finalized — we’ll already be ready to award the contract,” said Bunch.

The Air Force may be waiting still longer for its new GPS ground system through program progressing, said Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, who addressed the same AFA breakfast — but the program is not “out of the woods yet.”

A Deep Dive review held January 5 showed that progress had been made, said James, in part due to the contributions of the new, computer-savvy Air Force Digital Service. “I’m confident that it’s going to be continuing to make that progress; I’m just not as confident on the time frame that’s going to be required,.” she said.

Indeed, some delay has already occurred, said DoD spokesman Mark Wright, who confirmed in a prepared statement that there might be further schedule slippage.

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Frank Kendall, and the Air Force’s Service Acquisition Executive, Darlene Costello, conducted the fourth of a series of quarterly program reviews at the Raytheon campus in Aurora, Colorado, Wright he said.

“Raytheon briefed their progress on several topics,” Wright said. “Agile software development implementation is continuing with significant progress in developing cloud development environments. On Block 0, Raytheon completed the Launch and Checkout System Factory Qualification Test Runs for Record with an 88.6% pass rate, slightly higher than government expectation. Also, Block 1 software development recently delivered the latest iteration to testing with more Functional Objectives completed than planned.”

“Although some schedule slip to the targeted re-plan has occurred and more is not unlikely,” Wright said, “Undersecretary Kendall and Ms. Costello concluded Raytheon has made progress implementing these critical changes.”

What that means for the future is hard to predict. Trump has made it clear that he is unhappy with contracts that run over their budgets and schedules and he has taken public shots at some programs including the F-35 strike fighter jet. Raytheon’s OCX contract already faced cancellation this summer because of cost overruns and delays. The Air Force, however, has made it clear that it needs OCX. The selection of the new Secretary of the Air Force may provide a clue to the contract’s future.

Spectrum Proposals
Over on Capitol Hill, among the hundreds of bills already under consideration, is the MOBILE NOW Act (S. 19). Reintroduced by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., after it failed to gain traction last year, the bill would mandate that 500 MHz megahertz of federal and nonfederal spectrum be found by the end of 2020 to support wireless broadband; of that 255 megahertzMHz must be below 6,000 megahertz.

This echoes the spectrum mandate issued by President Barack Obama in June 2010. That triggered a federal spectrum hunt that became an element in a 2011 fight between the GPS community and LightSquared (the firm has since changed its name to Ligado Networks) to rezone frequencies close to those used for GPS signals. Tests at the time showed that the firm’s network would overpower the vast majority of GPS receivers.

Ligado’s proposal has since been updated somewhat in terms of both the frequencies the firm wants to use and its proposed operational power levels. Even so the plan remains in limbo and concerns continue as new test results are released.

The MOBILE NOW Act takes four blocks of frequencies in the L band off the table when it comes to meeting the 500 megahertzMHz quota. The frequencies supporting GPS, however, are not in those protected bands.

The bill does say, the Secretary of Commerce and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must consider “the need to preserve critical existing and planned Federal Government capabilities.” It also notes “the need for appropriate enforcement mechanisms and authorities.” One of the concerns expressed regarding Ligado’s proposal is how interference would be monitored and addressed should a way forward be found.

The Ligado proposal is certainly not the first that raised worries about interference with the GPS signal and it is unlikely to be the last. Spectrum is valuable and lawmakers have long sought ways to free more frequencies for commercial use.

Thune has said, according to a report by Morning Consult, that he intends a step-by-step rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934. He would have allies on the House side in Reps. Greg Walden, R-Oregon and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Michigan, who began working in 2013 to recast the Communications Act. Among the ideas floated by Walden and Upton were flexible-use frequency licenses which, a white paper they issued said, would “permit licensees to use their spectrum for any service, including wireless, broadcast, or satellite services,” as opposed to the current system of designating what uses can be made of specific frequencies.

The GPS Innovation Alliance said at the time that “flexible use” was described in a separate white paper by the FCC Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) as permitting “uses up to and including high power mobile network downlinks.” This could cause interference to adjacent spectrum users who would be forced to accommodate, over time, their ill-located neighbors, the group said.

Walden and Upton fielded other ideas including setting receiver standards and downgrading the role of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). NTIA manages the federal use of spectrum and is an empowered, potential advocate for GPS.

Walden, who was just named chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has already introduced one bill changing the Communications Act — but it has nothing to do with spectrum or the issues mentioned above. It proposes to change the way the FCC does its business to improve transparency and efficiency.

On a separate note, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb. — along with Cory Booker DNew Jersey; Cory Gardner, R-Colorado; and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii — introduced the Developing and Growing the Internet of Things (DIGIT) Act (S. 88). This bill, whose language had not yet been released as of press time, would direct the FCC to begin finding spectrum to support the Internet of Things.

PNT and Cybersecurity
While the spectrum-related bills could pose challenges to future GPS users, legislation seeking to protect the nation’s infrastructure and enhance cybersecurity could help protect systems that depend on GPS to function — and perhaps, by extension, GPS itself.

The Support for Rapid Innovation Act of 2017 (HR 239) would direct the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — which already has the lead role in providing a backup for the GPS system — to support cybersecurity technologies. If passed, this would include, for example, activities such as developing and deploying more secure information systems and improving and creating mitigation and resilient networks. The bill would also direct DHS to assist in the development and support of technologies to reduce vulnerabilities in industrial control systems.

DHS has already determined that the data in the GPS signal is an essential element in 13 of its 16 critical infrastructure areas, going so far as to call it a “single point of failure for critical infrastructure.” Viewing PNT — additionally — as an essential part of cybersecurity, especially given the current political atmosphere, could open new avenues to securing a backup for PNT services.

“Accurate position, navigation and timing (PNT) is necessary for the functioning of many critical infrastructure sectors,” the agency wrote on its website. “Precision timing is one aspect that is particularly important, with one microsecond level or better synchronization often being required by numerous infrastructure systems, such as the electric grid, communication networks and financial institutions.”

GPS vulnerabilities are “absolutely” a cybersecurity issue, said Dana Goward, the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, which has been advocating for a GPS backup system. Disruption of the GPS signal, he said, “interferes with end use devices, it interferes with transmission pathways and it very much is capable of putting false data into databases. So yeah, it’s cyber every which way from Sunday.”

“GPS interference, whether intentional or unintentional, is a potential threat to multiple critical infrastructures,” said Scott Pace, a GPS expert and the director of the Space Policy Institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. “While not commonly thought of as a cybersecurity issue, you can certainly make an argument that it should be.”

Moving Fast
The Support for Rapid Innovation Act, which was sponsored by Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, is moving through Congress at a fast clip. It has already passed the House and been assigned to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

A sister bill, also sponsored by Ratcliffe, is on a similar trajectory. The Leveraging Emerging Technologies Act of 2017 (HR 240) would encourage DHS to engage with companies with innovative technologies that could address DHS needs. This bill seems focused on tapping entrepreneurial enclaves like Silicon Valley but also mentions incorporating “proven” technologies into an acquisition strategy.

Provisions in HR 240 could arguably encompass eLoran, a PNT backup system being tested by the Harris Corporation and UrsaNav in the United States and developed for use elsewhere in the world. Though DHS is already looking at eLoran, its approach has been fractured at best, with one part of the agency pondering ways to address GPS vulnerabilities while the Coast Guard, which has been part of DHS since 2003, was tearing down eLoran related infrastructure until it was finally ordered to stop by Congress. Being incorporated into a congressionally mandated, agency-wide plan to work with firms might be useful.

There are other bills of interest to the GPS community in the works. For example, the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017 (HR 353) includes a provision ordering the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to test an Observing System Simulation Experiment to assess the value of data from Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation.

Like the two DHS bills, the weather bill has already passed the House and is in the hands of Senate lawmakers. It is not clear why these bills are moving so fast but perhaps it is a sign that Congress is poised for a productive year — a year that will, hopefully, move the marker on GPS issues.

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