At the PNT Leadership Summit last September, Locata CEO Nunzio Gambale put a blunt question on the screen again and again: “What’s your replacement?”

He asked it over ports, offshore energy projects, precision agriculture systems and critical infrastructure sites operating in what his presentation called “red zones”—places where GNSS-dependent systems may fail, degrade or become unreliable because of jamming, spoofing or other forms of interference. Across those examples, the warning was the same: high-value civilian systems have been built around precision positioning, navigation and timing, but many still have no credible replacement when the signals they depend on are denied.

That argument has become progressively more difficult to dismiss.

Only months earlier, Gambale said, Ukraine’s June 1, 2025, Operation Spider Web demonstrated how low-cost, precisely coordinated stealth drone attacks could reach strategic targets far beyond the front lines. Ukraine said it used 117 drones, and the Council on Foreign Relations described the attack as evidence that low-cost precision strikes are becoming accessible to many state and non-state actors.

For Gambale, Operation Spider Web has forever changed the strategic logic of PNT. If the now ubiquitous drones can use satellite navigation to reach strategic assets, governments and operators defending those assets will have to increasingly jam, spoof or otherwise deny the signals those drones rely on. The result is a new kind of collateral damage: Civilian systems that depend on the same signals may be disrupted by the defensive measures intended to protect national infrastructure.

That was the September argument.

Since then, the jamming and spoofing environment has become more urgent, particularly around the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, in the Baltic area, Russian electronic warfare is already turning that risk into a live political and operational crisis. In May, Ukrainian officials said Russian electronic warfare had deliberately diverted Ukrainian drones into Latvian airspace, with repeated incursions culminating in explosions at an oil storage facility and contributing to the collapse of Latvia’s government. Inside GNSS+ reported that widespread GNSS interference in the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz region coincided with sharp disruption in commercial shipping, with maritime analytics providers documenting more than 1,100 vessels affected by GPS and AIS interference in a 24-hour period, including ships falsely positioned at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.

That escalation makes Gambale’s question feel less like a conference provocation and more like an operational imperative.

The resulting challenge is more difficult than simply asking for a backup to GPS. For Gambale, that phrase is too vague to be useful. The real question is application-specific. 

“This isn’t simply about backing up GPS,” Gambale said. “The point of PNT is the outcome: What the application requires, and what can still deliver it when GPS is degraded, denied or no longer trusted.”

That is the core of his argument. The world did not adopt GNSS merely as a convenience; it built entire classes of infrastructure, automation and digital systems on top of it. Now the same signal dependency that enabled enormous economic value has also become a systemic vulnerability.

The Civilian Problem Has Changed 

For decades, GNSS interference was often framed as a military concern. Jamming and spoofing belonged to battlefields, contested borders and electronic warfare scenarios. Gambale believes that framing is “no longer even close to the reality.”

The drone era has changed the logic. If hostile drones use GNSS to navigate, then defending critical infrastructure absolutely demands the denial of that same signal locally. In other words, the jamming will not come only from the adversary; it will inevitably also come from the government or operator trying to protect its own critical assets.

“What’s the first thing you need to do for anti-drone systems?” Gambale said. “You need to jam the GPS, so that the enemy can’t use the same signal that you’re using. I can tell you categorically that in, say, the UAE, it’s not the U.S. or Israel or Iran that’s jamming Dubai or Abu Dhabi. It’s the UAE itself. We’ve heard credible reports that a GNSS jammer is now installed at the top of the Burj Khalifa. Think about that. It’s called ‘frequency fratricide’… and the Golden Dome, Drone Walls and many other national protection systems you see being built are now undeniable proof that ‘jam yourselves’ is the future.”

That creates what he sees as the new civilian crisis: The same denial zone meant to protect national strategic sites will inevitably disable the civilian systems built around satellite PNT.

“If you want to deny this magical capability to your enemy, you have to deny it to the areas around your critical infrastructure,” Gambale said. “However, you then jam the surveyors, you jam the harbor pilots bringing ships into port, you jam all of the autonomous systems, you jam the mobile phone technologies, you jam the timing for data centers, you jam the landing systems for aircraft. Uber Eats. Waymo. Google Maps.”

That argument is not merely a Locata argument. Gambale cites Doug Taggart, president of Overlook Systems Technologies and an ION Fellow, in the Spring 2026 ION Newsletter. Taggart argued that GPS now underpins transportation safety, economic activity, communication networks, precision agriculture and critical infrastructure, while the United States has spent more than 25 years struggling to identify a backup. Taggart’s conclusion was that resilient PNT capability should be understood as an inherently governmental responsibility, whether the physical systems are government-operated or commercially provided.

That framing shifts the debate from product or solution selection to public responsibility. The issue is not whether GPS remains essential. It does. The issue is whether critical systems can continue operating when GPS is unavailable, untrusted or locally denied.

The Port Test: What Happens When Precision Stops?

Gambale’s most concrete example, from Locata’s own experience in the jamming zones, is port automation. In his summit presentation, he used the Port of Gdańsk and major Baltic infrastructure projects to illustrate the new PNT reality. The point was not simply that ports use GNSS. It was that modern automation systems, such as in ports, logistics hubs, etc., all depend on very precise positioning—continuously and reliably.

The presentation described a $3 billion Port of Gdańsk expansion, with automation as a key part of Polish port infrastructure. It also described fully autonomous rubber-tired gantries—25 ordered, 26 meters high by 30 meters wide, $20 million each, using three RTK GNSS systems for autosteer and placement—with a requirement of less than 2 centimeters, 3 sigma, 24/7/365, without fail.

Large autonomous gantries and other automated systems do not need “some” positioning. They must have centimeter-level positioning, all day, every day. If the position solution degrades, the machine does not simply become less efficient. It stops dead.

“These machines are automated, and they’re stacking containers on top of one another autonomously, without any human in the loop,” Gambale said. “They must have two- to five-centimeter positioning, or else the entire system doesn’t work. This is not some academic argument. When an infrastructure site like Gdansk is jammed, the company literally owns $500 million dollars’ worth of ‘bricks.’ The company’s need for centimeter-level GNSS is dire. Jamming can cost millions per day. And that is a clear and existential threat to a business’ existence.”

He framed the problem in operational terms. A lower-accuracy backup may sound useful on a policy slide, but if it cannot support the application’s required precision, it does not solve the problem.

“If a ‘solution’ blows out past five centimeters, the machines must stop,” he said. “Something that gives you 2 meters of ‘GPS backup’ is of absolutely no use to that type of application.”

That distinction is central to his argument. The market does not need a generic conversation about backup. It needs a performance conversation: what accuracy, what timing, what integrity, what availability, what resilience under interference, and what happens when the system is spoofed?

If the answer does not meet the application requirements, then the infrastructure remains exposed, critically compromised and vulnerable.

Precision as Infrastructure

Gambale extends the same argument to offshore construction, surveying, logistics and warehousing sites, and precision agriculture. In each case, PNT is not a convenience layered onto the application. It is part of the operating system.

Gambale pointed out that view is strongly supported by ESA’s March 2024 NAVAC PNT Vision 2035 White Paper, produced under the guidance of NAVAC Chaiman, Luis Mayo. According to the report, more than 6.5 billion GNSS devices were already installed worldwide by 2021, with the installed base expected to grow to 10.6 billion by 2031. Also, according to the report, roughly 10% of EU GDP relies on GNSS to some degree, while consumer, IoT and automotive applications represent more than 90% of the market.

But the report’s most important point for Gambale’s thesis is not market size. It is dependency. NAVAC warns that as GNSS use spread across application domains, society built an increasingly deep dependence on these systems. The report identifies jamming, spoofing and interference as growing concerns, and specifically notes that accurate timing is the main critical use case for critical infrastructure.

That supports Gambale’s point: PNT is no longer a navigation feature. It is a dependency layer underneath automation, logistics, energy, telecom, finance, data centers, transportation and every nation’s digital economy and critical infrastructure.

The performance requirements for modern and emerging applications are also not abstract. Gambale points out that NAVAC’s 2035 requirements table points to centimeter-class horizontal and vertical accuracy requirements for many high-value applications: 2 to 15 cm for precision irrigation and cultivation, 4 to 6 cm for kinematic survey, and 10 cm for Level 3-and-above road autonomy and collision avoidance. For timing-dependent applications such as the coming 6G and DVB networks, the requirement moves from position into time, with NAVAC citing the need for 10-ns timing accuracy.

A backup that preserves rough continuity may be valuable for some applications. But it is not enough for a port that needs centimeters, a precision agriculture workflow that depends on corrected guidance, or a timing network that needs nanosecond-level synchronization.

In his PNT Leadership Summit presentation, Gambale cites Baltic offshore wind construction and a $5.1 billion Baltic Power project that is essential for Poland’s energy security and independence, including 76 Vestas 15 MW turbines. He also frames offshore construction requirements in hard operational terms: precision construction needs less than 5 centimeters at 3 sigma, 24/7/365, without fail; and ship dynamic position systems (which automatically maintains a vessel’s exact position and heading using its own propellers and thrusters) needs less than 10 centimeters at 3 sigma to work.

In agriculture, Gambale points out, interference does not need to jam an entire operating area to cause disruption. If today’s essential correction infrastructure is vulnerable, the precision layer then collapses.

“In the Ukraine, it’s now become even more trivial to jam a huge area of farmland,” he said. “You don’t have to try to jam the whole area. You just jam the local reference station, and that whole area is toast.”

That observation turns PNT into a food security issue, not simply a navigation issue. A tractor autosteer system, a surveyor, a road construction company, a port crane, an offshore construction vessel and a data center may appear to occupy different markets, but they all share the same dependency: high-confidence position and time.

Gambale’s message is that resilience must be judged against the actual application, not against a generic idea of signal continuity.

Do Not Deploy Your Grandfather’s GPS Backup

One of the strongest lines in Gambale’s presentation was: “Do not deploy your grandfather’s GPS backup.”

It is an intentionally provocative phrase, but the point is technical. Many valuable present-day applications—and most future applications—need high accuracy, high confidence and trusted timing. Systems that provide only low-accuracy continuity do have value for some uses, but they will not keep a modern autonomous port or logistics site, precision agriculture workflow, road construction site or high-value industrial operation running.

ESA’s NAVAC report reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle. It says future PNT will be delivered through a combination of alternative, independent and complementary sources: multiple GNSS in different orbits and frequencies, cellular networks, terrestrial systems such as eLoran, Wi-Fi and signals of opportunity, augmentation systems, inertial sensors, quantum sensors, magnetic sensors, miniature atomic clocks and digital maps. It also concludes that future systems will increasingly operate as “systems of systems” designed to meet the performance required for a given application.

That is very close to Gambale’s “what does your application need?” mantra. A technology is not useful because it belongs to a fashionable category. It is useful if it meets the required accuracy, timing, integrity and resilience for the mission.

And those requirements are getting more difficult, not easier.

NAVAC states that “accuracy is addictive,” that users will demand more robust solutions less susceptible to natural or man-made disruption, and that assured PNT demand will grow tenfold by 2035, including in physically challenging environments such as indoors, multi-story buildings, urban canyons and underground facilities.

That is why Gambale’s critique of low-performance complementary PNT is so sharp. “There is no point deploying technology that gets you three quarters of the way there, and the port is still stopped,” he said.

Positioning Depends on Timing

For Gambale, timing is the most underappreciated part of the PNT discussion. “PNT only exists because of the T,” he said.

That statement is more than a slogan. Positioning systems depend on timing. Digital infrastructure depends on timing. Telecom, financial systems, data centers, power grids, autonomous systems and distributed industrial operations all require trusted time at levels appropriate to their applications.

Taggart makes the same point in institutional terms. His ION Newsletter column notes that, through NIST, the Department of Commerce maintains the nation’s time and frequency standards, while NIST and the U.S. Naval Observatory provide official U.S. precise-time contributions to the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, which calculates Coordinated Universal Time. He also notes that financial markets, telecommunications services, data networks, electric power grids, pipelines and SCADA services all depend on timing derived from GPS.

For Gambale, that dependency should drive a different standard of performance. He argues the industry too often talks about timing in terms of minimum standards rather than future capability.

“The world isn’t asking for worse timing,” he said. “As you get better and better timing, you get better and better positioning, and better and better digital capabilities. That’s why our Locata team has dedicated several decades of innovation to be able to deliver GNSS-free, sub-nanosecond synchronization and time transfer.”

He explains the issue in terms engineers understand: error budgets. Every system has a set of error sources—timing error, multipath, atmospheric effects, electronic variation, geometry, signal processing limits and more. If timing consumes too much of the error budget, there is less margin left for everything else.

“If the bucket is 75% full of timing error, that leaves them a lot less margin to play with,” Gambale said. “However, if we can reduce that timing error budget down to 10% of the bucket, then they’ve got a lot more leeway with the rest of the error budget.”

That is why he sees timing as a foundation, not a feature. Better timing does not merely improve clocks. It improves the ability to position, synchronize, automate and trust distributed systems.

NAVAC also emphasizes timing. The report states that accurate timing is the critical use case for communications and power distribution networks, and it identifies distributed and networked time-scale infrastructures as an important path toward resilient timing applications independent from GNSS.

Multipath, Trust and the Devil in the Real World

Gambale is equally forceful about multipath, explaining why Locata has spent years creating new technology to mitigate this obstacle. In terrestrial and obstructed environments, reflected signals can become one of the dominant sources of error. It is not enough to say a transmitter is nearby or a signal is stronger. The system must manage reflections, geometry and line-of-sight integrity.

“Multipath is the devil,” he said. “It is everywhere, and unless you deal with it, you will never be able to give an accurate position that’s reliable.”

This is where the conversation then turns from availability to trust.

Jamming denies. Spoofing deceives. Multipath corrupts. Each poses a different challenge. A receiver that produces an answer is not necessarily producing a trustworthy answer. In heavily automated systems, that distinction can become dangerous.

Gambale argues that users have become conditioned to trust the box. The receiver gives a position, and the system accepts it. That worked in an era when GNSS was generally available and interference was occasional. It becomes much more fragile in an environment of persistent jamming and spoofing.

“It’s all about trust,” Gambale said. “Even if GPS comes back, many huge companies no longer want to depend on it, because it is no longer trustworthy.”

That may be the most important transition in the PNT debate. Availability asks whether the signal exists. Trust asks whether the system should act on it.

From AIR to Sovereignty

In the summit presentation, Gambale framed the future of complementary PNT around three validated attributes: Accuracy, Integrity and Resilience—AIR.

Accuracy means the system can meet the application’s actual performance requirement. Integrity means the user can trust the answer, especially in safety-of-life or mission-critical applications. Resilience means the system continues to function—or recovers predictably—under real-world stress. Gambale stated: “Without AIR your application will die!”

Gambale has since added a fourth concept: sovereignty.

For him, sovereignty does not only mean national ownership in a political sense. It means control. Control over the PNT layer that critical systems depend on. Control over the ability to deploy, operate and trust the infrastructure required for the mission. Control over the destiny of an organization, business or site.

Gambale returns repeatedly to the idea that nations and critical infrastructure operators must stop thinking of PNT as an invisible utility that simply arrives from somewhere else. They must treat it as critical infrastructure. Lifeblood for their business.

“Electricity is wonderful,” he said. “It is distributed everywhere. But show me one critical infrastructure site that doesn’t have backup batteries or a generator.”

The analogy is simple and powerful. Critical sites rely on the grid, but they do not trust the grid alone. They build backup capability because the consequences of failure are too severe. Gambale believes PNT now requires the same mindset.

The Spectrum Sandbox

His policy prescription is equally direct: create a terrestrial PNT spectrum framework.

“The best thing that America can do to push real PNT resilience forward is to allocate a terrestrial spectrum for the job,” he said. “Give it a slice of spectrum that everybody can play in, if they wish.”

For Gambale, this would create a sandbox for innovation. Satellite systems have protected spectrum. Terrestrial PNT, if it is to become a serious resilience layer, needs a comparable policy foundation. Within that framework, industry, universities and government could build and test systems designed for specific application requirements.

“Allocate spectrum just like the satellites have got spectrum,” he said. “Allocate a terrestrial capability where you can determine what’s required for each application in an area. But give us the sandbox. Then let 1,000 innovations bloom, as was the case in the early days of GPS.”

That argument moves the discussion beyond individual products. It treats PNT resilience as an ecosystem problem. If the United States—or any sovereign nation—wants local, high-confidence PNT capability, then the nation must create the conditions for such systems to exist.

It also fits the broader direction of PNT architecture. NAVAC’s 2035 vision does not imagine one replacement for GNSS. It imagines combinations of systems: space-based, terrestrial, cellular, augmentation-based and sensor-based. It also warns that alternative systems must avoid hidden dependencies on GNSS itself, such as using GNSS as the time reference for supposedly independent ground networks, or as an essential reinitialization of an IMU system.

That warning is central to the Gambale thesis. A backup that depends on the system it is backing up is not a true replacement. A resilience layer that fails under the same conditions as GNSS may add complexity without adding survivability.

Gambale sees the spectrum sandbox as a chance not merely to protect infrastructure, but to create the next exportable PNT architecture.

“If America does it first, and you have all of your bright minds, and the universities, Silicon Valley, and everyone throws some real effort at it, you can do exactly what you do with GPS,” he said. “You can export it all over the world again.”

Then came the line he delivered with a laugh, but not entirely as a joke:

“Make PNT great again.”

The phrase works because the argument underneath it is serious. GPS was one of the United States’ greatest contributions to the modern world. It enabled entire industries. It created enormous civilian and commercial value. But the dependence it enabled has also become a 21st-century infrastructure vulnerability.

As Gambale put it: “The U.S. nation in the 1990s gave the world one of the greatest gifts of all time. That gift has now created one of the biggest problems for the 21st century. That problem must be solved. And Locata has created exceptional new high-accuracy technology that does not depend on GNSS at all. It delivers a level of control and sovereignty that will certainly be part of the ‘future of PNT.’”

For ports, farms, offshore energy projects, logistics hubs, construction sites, autonomous systems and critical infrastructure operators, the need for a solution—for AIR, for control and for sovereignty—is no longer theoretical. The jamming and spoofing environment is real and escalating. The performance requirements are not abstract. And the dependency on a signal that was never designed to carry this much weight is not going away on its own.

That is the state of play. 

The post The New PNT Reality appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

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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“On the CS, we are dialoging extensively with EU member states, because there is a more and more consolidated view that there could be an advantage to providing the service for free,” des Dorides said.

At the lavish European Satellite Navigation Competition Awards Ceremony, we caught up with Carlo des Dorides, general director of the European GNSS Agency (GSA), who updated us on the status of the much-anticipated Galileo Commercial Service (CS).

“On the CS, we are dialoging extensively with EU member states, because there is a more and more consolidated view that there could be an advantage to providing the service for free,” des Dorides said.

For those who don’t know, the CS, from its conception and now for many years, has always been described and planned for as a fee-based, revenue-generating service. Indeed, the revenues to be generated by the CS have been described as offsetting to a measurable degree to the overall investment in the Galileo system.

Explaining the reasons for the shift, des Dorides said, “First and easiest, we believe that the induced value of providing the service for free will be far higher than if we provide it on a paying basis. If we go back to studies that were performed about two years ago, and then we continue to look over the past two years, the estimated revenues coming from the use of the Commercial Service have been looking more and more ‘thin’.”

Des Dorides said the GSA and the Commission see location and navigation technologies going in the direction of multi-system, multi-GNSS, which by itself will continue to provide better and better accuracy, ultimately limiting the draw of a fee-based high-accuracy system.

“So, the expected revenues are shrinking,” he said, “while on the other hand there is still the idea that Galileo can be the first mover to provide a high-accuracy service, but as a free service.”

“By high accuracy we mean around 20 centimeters,” des Dorides said, “not the 10 centimeters that you can find offered by various manufacturers in the market — these are different. We are talking about 20 centimeters with a convergence time on the order of five minutes, and you know that that 10 centimeter accuracy I mentioned comes with a 15-minute convergence time, so it’s a different market.”

Thus, he said, an accuracy on the order of 20 centimeters, delivered for free, could represent a competitive advantage for Galileo vis-a-vis the other GNSS systems.

“From the formal point of view,” he added, “there is a regulation [EU Regulation governing Galileo and CS] that clearly states that this is to be a commercial service, so we need to be sure that there is a political consensus among all member states,” because the regulation will have to be modified.

And therein lies the matter. The EU member states, soon to number 27 without the UK, need to go along with this fundamentally new direction for the CS, and we all know by now just how time- and energy-consuming EU wrangling of this sort can be. But des Dorides says he is optimistic: “It is difficult to tell you when this debate will end,” he said, “but I don’t expect it to go for 12 months. I expect in the next two to three months a decision will be made.”

EU Credibility in the Balance?
We also spoke to Philippe Jean, European Commission head of unit for Galileo legal and institutional aspects. He told essentially the same story, with some additional details, from the point of view of the Commission.

“There is a discussion that is taking place for the moment between the Commission and EU member states in order to fix the question of is the Commercial Service going to be free or is it going to be delivered for a fee,” Jean said.

“Since the beginning of the year, we at the Commission have been changing our minds and we think that now we have to go more in the direction of a free service, and we want to convince our member states to change their minds too. It’s an internal discussion, it’s an institutional discussion. But we expect to take a decision quite quickly, in order not to postpone the procurement situation.”

Jean said signs show Galileo’s competitors, in Japan for sure and perhaps in China, are likely to launch their own high-accuracy, CS-like services in the near future, and for free. So not only is it in Galileo’s interest to offer a free service, but also to do it quickly, to be the first to put such a service on the market. “What exactly is the asset if we are not doing it first?” Jean asked rhetorically.

He also cited the estimates mentioned by des Dorides, showing a negligible revenue stream for a fee-based service. “The income would be something like one percent of the actual Galileo budget, and for that we would lose the advantage of being the first to offer a free commercial service?”

That’s not to say that there aren’t voices opposing the move. There has already been significant investment laid out on building a CS based on incoming revenues, particularly among private companies.”I do understand the concerns of member states,” Jean said, “because they have been building a system with companies, and all of a sudden we are changing our minds, after so many years. Perhaps we will need to do some arbitration in order to manage the expectations of the companies that have been working on the system in the last two-three years.”

The pressure is real, Jean said; “What we are discussing is a key parameter, and when you go around, to events like this one in Tallinn, you can see it, you can feel it. There is a high level of expectation that the CS should provide a quality of service that is not offered by the Open Service (OS). So, it’s a problem of credibility. And the fact that there is an Open Service creates the expectation that the Commercial Service is going to come very quickly afterwards.”

“You have been following what we do for a long period of time, so you can guess that we now need to take a decision very quickly.” And yet, he said, the details of what the final product will look like are still not clear. “It’s not going to be with a fee for everything, but it will not be free for everything either, but something in between. I’m not expert in that, but we have understood there is a possibility to make a distinction between what is free and what is fee-based.”

Once the fee-free question and some further details about how authentication will work are sorted out, Jean said, it should be possible to launch a procurement process for the end of 2018. “Right now, no one can say when the system will become available. Of course everybody prefers 2018, but we need to wait and see how this current discussion goes.”

Both Jean and des Dorides described a relatively straightforward process, assuming minimal delay, but we would not be surprised to see that process being drawn out due to various circumstances. If it goes on for too long, the Commission could find itself being beaten to the punch by a Japanese or Chinese CS, and then its credibility will rightly be questioned.

Galileo Perspective
Back with des Dorides, we went over some recent and forthcoming milestones in the ongoing saga that is Galileo.

Standout moments in the past few months have included the announcement last September by Apple that the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X will be Galileo-compatible. “With that, Apple became the last of the big smartphone manufacturers to integrate Galileo,” des Dorides said. “We now have Huawei, Sony, Samsung and Apple, which was our goal from the beginning.”

The Apple announcement was followed quickly by Broadcom’s unveiling of the first mass-market, dual-frequency chip. “And this means we could see a dual-frequency smartphone as soon as next spring,” des Dorides said. “This also allows Galileo to be used at full potential, improving accuracy but also helping in complex environments, in cities, against multi-path effects.”

Here he mentioned the remarkable fact that Galileo is now operating more dual-frequency satellites than GPS. “I believe GPS has 11, if I’m not wrong. So we are truly on the technology edge,” he said.

Another fundamental milestone for Galileo was the successful transition last July from operations on a best-effort basis to the live exploitation phase, handing the GSA full responsibility for operational service provision.

Looking forward, the program will see its next launch on December 12, with four satellites to be lifted into orbit by the awe-inspiring Ariane 5 launcher.

“Then, in a couple of months, we will be awarding a new contract for the ground control segment, another tangible sign that Galileo is moving forward on pace,” des Dorides said. “And finally, in the last quarter of 2018, really the most important milestone for next year, we will announce the new enhanced service.”

This is essentially the next release of Galileo, he said, coming two years after initial services. It will include the OS authentication, and a new release for the ground segment, for the Galileo Security Monitoring Center (GSMC), entailing the distribution of keys for the PRS. There will also be a new SAR feature, the so-called “return link”, which will inform people calling for emergency aid that their call has been received.

A Rather Political Business Roundtable
Among the diverse highlights of EU Space Week in Tallinn was the Satellite Masters Conference, which kicked off with a “business roundtable” featuring some business people and a number of EU institutional representatives.

The word “integration” was repeated a number of times in the first minutes and throughout the session, as were other familiar words and phrases such as “diversity” and “freedom of movement” — words that have lately become more closely associated with political and social discourse in our part of the world.

After several repetitions of these words and phrases by a sequence of speakers, one began to get the impression that these popular buzzwords from the socio-political sphere were being systematically superimposed on the discussion, a discussion purportedly concerned with business.

To be sure, the meaning of these words was slightly shifted to fit the context; here, for example, the words “diversity” and “integration” tended more to refer to bringing in new companies with diverse visions, and integrating different groups in support of innovation, etc. “Freedom of movement” referred more to goods, services and specialized personnel than to just regular people.

And then one remembered that, after all, EU space policy in general, like the Galileo program in particular, are owned by a public body. Indeed we were reminded explicitly by GSA Head of Market Development Gian-Gherardo Calini, who, when asked to talk about the particular strengths of the Galileo program, replied virtually instantaneously, as if without needing to think, “It’s civil.” Galileo, unlike the United States’ GPS, is a civil program, owned and run by the European Commission, not a private one, and especially not a military one.

The language of the EU’s prevailing political and social agenda is written all over the EU space strategy, and it fills the mouths of its representatives. We only wish to point out that not serving a military master does not mean not serving a master. It only means serving a different master.

More Impertinence Inspired by the Roundtable
The program of the Satellite Masters Conference, put together we assume by conference organizers AZO, included a brief introduction, which read, in part, “Despite current tendencies that are threatening to pull Europe apart…” (followed by something about the benefits of staying together).

This somewhat cryptic reference to forces working to destroy Europe was echoed by broadcast journalist and roundtable moderator Louise Houghton, who, in her very brief opening remarks, invited all to consider the significance of 2017 for the European Union, “…at a time when many of the fundamental principles are being challenged”.

In neither case were the sources of imminent menace elaborated upon, and we won’t speculate here as to what they might be. But it might be a good idea for someone to look into this.

Less Political, Still Eyebrow-Raising
Dinka Dinkova, European Commission deputy head of unit for space data for societal challenges and growth, told the audience at the business roundtable, “Europe is the best place in the world to start a business.”

That’s a claim that might have been disputed by Rainer Sternfeld, founder of Planet OS, had he chosen to speak up at that moment. Instead, he waited until he was asked a separate question, to which he answered, “Europe is a big market and very quality-oriented, but it’s not always the best for young companies.”

Sternfeld is, by the way, a European, who went off to America to start an extremely successful high-tech company. We spoke to him after the roundtable and asked him to elaborate. “If you want to be a good chef you have to go to France,” he said. “There’s this place Silicon Valley and you just have to go there. We went there because of the market and the investors and the understanding of how to build these kinds of new-value businesses. And I wanted to push myself, you know, to the edge.”

Sternfeld volunteered more, saying, “If you really want to look critically at Europe, then, depending on your business, sometimes it’s like, OK you have 500 million people in Europe but it’s so distributed across these different countries and it’s not easy to trade because every country will very often have its own rules, even if you have free trade and now the European Union has a single market. In the U.S. you have one big market, so just knock yourself out.

“One example,” he continued, “you can ship wine very easily from one country to another all over Europe, but with digital it’s a little different. Say if you want to buy a song on iTunes, then in the U.S. I can be wherever I want, but Europe has put a system in place that basically forbids the free movement of such services. That’s a simple example, and in satellite data or data in general there are similar things.”

So, Europe still has a way to go when it comes to removing these types of borders.

Nägemist Tallinn
We leave Estonia with a positive message from des Dorides: “We are coming very soon now to the start of the debate on the space budget. It will not be an easy debate, first of all because of Brexit. But I feel that space has a favorable future. I sense the EU does believe in space and the forthcoming budget will be consistent with this.”

Galileo is delivering the expected results, he said. The program’s mid-term review was positive, and the other EU space initiatives are also viewed favorably. The days of the doubters seem well and truly gone.

The ESA budget, des Dorides pointed out, has remained relatively stable in recent years, while the EU has grown its space budget significantly. “We are in a position to be positive about space in Europe,” he concluded. And, all things considered, yes, so are we, until next time.

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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.”

The post Ligado: Business and Network Plan Remain Unclear appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

Today’s headlines frame my thoughts about securing GNSS assets, which one expert has characterized as our “least visible and most vulnerable infrastructure.”

In the Columbia River Gorge, a National Scenic Area spanning the Washington-Oregon border, a 15-year-old boy has been accused of intentionally tossing fireworks into tinder-dry grass thereby starting a (thus far) 33,000-acre forest fire that has devastated a natural treasure. Meanwhile, in the latest incident of large-scale identity theft, credit-rating agency Equifax has belatedly acknowledged a months-long breach of its database in which 143 million personal records were reportedly accessed.

In one case, an individual — obliviously or purposefully — creates outsized havoc, in the other, a skilled team of professional thieves disrupt a global enterprise and endanger the financial well-being of millions.

Of course, we have headlines closer to the point, such as “Reports of Mass GPS Spoofing Attack in the Black Sea,” or “South Korea developing eLoran Network to Protect Ships” from North Korean GPS jamming.

These latter incidents, of course, arise from state-sponsored or –enabled actions. But, as with the Columbia gorge fire, personal behaviors — often harder to detect and prevent — can similarly afflict GNSS capabilities. In recent years, considerable attention has focused on the use of small GNSS jammers, also known as “personal privacy devices.” Perhaps the best-known case is that of a trucker trying to jam his vehicle’s own receiver who interrupted GPS-aided landing operations at Newark International Airport.

As the articles on jamming and spoofing mitigation in this issue of Inside GNSS reflect, the motives and methods of perpetrators vary. But, given the natural progression of information-sharing and widening expertise in GNSS — along with our cultural soft spot for making heroes out of rebels and outlaws — we can probably assume that the trend toward disruption will only get worse.

Some GNSS user groups have struck out on their own to ensure the security of their constituencies and their particular needs. Military users benefit from a variety of alternative PNT technologies such as geomagnetic mapping, vision- and image-based navigation, and chip-scale atomic clocks and inertial measurement units. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has decided to retain, for the time being, a minimum operational network of VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) facilities originally planned to be phased out with the introduction of GNSS.

Over time, some of these alternatives may migrate into the commercial and professional space — then again, they may not. And the vast majority of individual GNSS consumers have no organizations to advocate for their needs.

So, what is to be done? How can we ensure that the positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) utility is available to all users, and not just those sectors with the resources to develop solutions for themselves? The future of location-based applications and enterprise — and the associated economic benefits — depend on a satisfactory answer to that question.

Multi-level threats clearly require multi-tiered responses that fit the corresponding scope and scale of different domains. At the system level, GNSS providers are exploring such measures as encryption, signal authentication, stronger signal power, and advanced signal designs.

National and international legal/initiatives include such efforts as regulating the sale and use of GNSS jammers and spoofers. Alternative PNT systems — for example, enhanced Loran (eLoran) — represent a potential multinational approach to the problem.

At the level of user equipment, several GNSS manufacturers are incorporating interference detection and mitigation (IDM) and antispoofing capabilities into proprietary products.

The variety of these initiatives and their advocates illustrates the breadth of concern about assured PNT, but also reflect the fractured nature of responses to the threats to GNSS. The situation calls for leadership with the expertise and stature to bring comprehensive solutions before the wider GNSS community.

The International Committee on GNSS has the membership and forum, if not yet the clear mandate, to impose such solutions globally. At the national level, the U.S. Space-Based PNT Executive Committee assisted by its expert advisory panel seems the most likely candidate for this role.

The post Ensuring PNT for All appeared first on Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design.

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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The maritime sector drives the global economy, with ships transporting more than 80% of world trade. Ships and ports have come to rely on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) for a huge array of applications relating to position, velocity and precise universal and local time.

It is perhaps not surprising that the fallout from GNSS failure in the maritime sector over a five day-period could cost GBP£1.1billion in lost gross value added (GVA) in the United Kingdom alone (or about 1.4 billion USD) – according to a recent study by London Economics, commissioned by Innovate UK, the UK Space Agency and the Royal Institute of Navigation. [For more on this study, see Brussels View in the July/August 2017 issue of Inside GNSS.]

The threat of GNSS disruption to ships themselves is a real one. GPS interference in the Black Sea was reported earlier this year, affecting as many as 20 ships. And the United States Coast Guard warned that a sudden loss of GPS signal had occurred on multiple outbound vessels from a non-US port in 2015. Loss of GPS input to the ship’s surface search radar, gyro units and Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS), resulted in a lack of GPS data for position fixing, radar over ground speed inputs, gyro speed input and loss of collision avoidance capabilities on the ECDIS radar display.

However, ships do not rely on just GNSS alone for position fixing. A shipmaster can also deploy radar, or cross bearings using compass; terrestrial radio navigation; even sextants. This allows ships to mitigate the impact of GPS disruption.

Regulations in the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) require merchant ships to carry a receiver for a GNSS or a terrestrial radionavigation system, or other means, suitable for use at all times throughout the intended voyage to establish and update the ship’s position by automatic means. But they must also carry a compass, a device to take bearings, and backup arrangements for ECDIS.

The organization which oversees SOLAS and has the remit for adopting carriage requirements, operational requirements and performance standards for world shipping is the International Maritime Organization (IMO). IMO (originally known as the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization, or IMCO) is the United Nations specialized agency with responsibility for developing the regulations for ship safety and maritime security, and the prevention of pollution from ships.

IMO does not operate GNSS systems, but has an important role in accepting and recognizing worldwide radionavigation systems which can be used by international shipping.

When IMO began its work as the international regulatory body for shipping in 1959, one of its first tasks was to adopt a revised SOLAS treaty, to update the 1948 SOLAS treaty. (The very first SOLAS treaty was adopted in 1914, in the wake of the Titanic disaster, while another version was adopted in 1929.)

When the 1960 SOLAS was adopted by IMO, terrestrial radio navigation systems – including Decca Navigator and Loran A – were already in operation. In these systems, a ship’s radio receiver would measure transmissions from groups of radio transmitters sending signals simultaneously or in a controlled sequence. By measuring the phase difference between one pair of transmissions a line of position can be established. A second measurement, from another pair of stations, gives a second line and the intersection of the two lines gives the ship’s position.

In its chapter V on Safety of Navigation, SOLAS 1960 included a requirement for ships over 1,600 gross tonnage on international voyages to be fitted with radio direction-finding apparatus – a requirement dating back to the 1948 SOLAS Convention. The apparatus was required to comply with system requirements set out in SOLAS chapter IV on Radiotelegraphy and Radiotelephony (SOLAS Chapter IV is now called Radiocommunications).

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Loran C and Differential Omega radio navigation systems were also becoming operational in major areas of the world’s oceans and they were combined with early computer technology to provide electronic printouts of the ship’s position. The then-Soviet Union’s Chayka system also became operational.

During this time, IMO Member States increasingly recognized the importance of using navigation systems in maritime safety and preventing marine pollution, for example as an aid to avoiding hazards. In 1968, IMO recommended that ships carrying oil or other noxious or hazardous cargoes in bulk should carry “an efficient electronic position-fixing device” (Assembly resolution A.156(ES.IV) Recommendation on the Carriage of Electronic Position-Fixing Equipment).

IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee was also noticing the potential for accurate position finding which satellites could provide. As with other developments in technology with shipping applications, IMO’s concern was to ensure that the user would benefit from the new technology and that such new systems would at least meet agreed performance standards.

A recommendation on accuracy standards for navigation, adopted by the IMO Assembly in 1983 (resolution A.529(13)), provided “guidance to Administrations on the standards of navigation accuracy for assessing position-fixing systems, in particular radionavigation systems, including satellite systems”. Outside harbour entrances and approaches, the order of accuracy was set at “4% of distance from danger with a maximum of 4 nautical miles”.

This was a fairly moderate requirement compared to today’s systems.

The Maritime Safety Committee had, in the meantime, begun to consider whether ships should be required – on a mandatory basis – to carry means of receiving transmissions from a suitable radio navigation system throughout their intended voyage.

A study was initiated to look at the operational requirements (including the need for reliability and low user cost) and how such systems could be recognized or accepted by IMO.

The Report on the study of a World-Wide Radionavigation System was adopted by the IMO Assembly in 1989 (resolution A.666(16)). It gave a detailed summary of the different terrestrial-based radio navigation systems then in operation (Differential Omega, Loran-C, Chayka), and also the satellite systems in development. These were the Global Positioning System (GPS) (United States) and GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System) (then Soviet Union – now under the Russian Federation). It was agreed that IMO would develop performance standards for GPS and GLONASS receivers.

The study concluded that it was not feasible for IMO to fund a worldwide radio navigation system. However, IMO’s role would be to review radionavigation systems against set criteria, before they could be accepted. A radionavigation system adopted by IMO should be reliable, of low user cost, meet general navigation needs, provide accuracy not less than the standards adopted in 1983, and have 99.9% availability.

The study also recommended that changes to carriage requirements should not be considered until world-wide coverage had been achieved by a radionavigation satellite system.

In 1995, an updated study was adopted as the IMO policy for the recognition and acceptance of suitable radionavigation systems intended for international use in the world-wide radio navigation system (resolution A.815(19)). This study additionally recognized the need for provision of position information to support the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS), by locating vessels in distress. The needs of high speed craft, such as fast ferries, were recognized and the study noted that ships operating at speeds above 30 knots may need more stringent accuracy requirements.

Performance standards for shipborne GPS receiver equipment were also adopted in 1995, and for GLONASS receivers in 1996. GPS became fully operational in 1995 and GLONASS in 1996. Both systems were recognized by IMO as components of the world-wide radionavigation system in 1996.

Meeting Maritime User Needs
IMO Member States acknowledged that there was a need to look ahead, to ensure that any future GNSS would meet maritime user needs. “Maritime Requirements for a Future Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)” were developed and adopted by the IMO Assembly in 1997 (resolution A.860(20)). This emphasized the need for IMO to play a continued role in monitoring the developments and ensuring that any future GNSS meets IMO requirements, including those for navigational accuracy, integrity of the service, availability, reliability and coverage.

In 2000, with both GPS and GLONASS systems now fully functional and providing the required degree of reliability, IMO moved forward with adopting mandatory carriage requirements for GNSS.

A revised SOLAS chapter V (Safety of Navigation), which entered into force in 2002, requires ships to carry a GNSS or terrestrial radionavigation receiver, to establish and update the ship’s position by automatic means, for use at all times throughout the voyage.

IMO also adopted MSC resolutions on updated performance standards for Shipborne Global Positioning System (GPS) Receiver Equipment (MSC.112(73)), for GLONASS Receiver Equipment (MSC.113(73)), for Shipborne DGPS and DGLONASS Maritime Radio Beacon Receiver Equipment (MSC.114(73)) and for shipborne combined GPS/GLONASS receiver equipment (MSC.115(73)).

Reflecting the increased positional accuracy provided by GPS and GLONASS, an updated resolution giving the IMO policy for the recognition and acceptance of suitable radio navigation systems intended for international use was adopted in 2003 by the IMO Assembly (resolution A.953(23)).

This resolution made the accuracy standards required more stringent (revoking those agreed in 1983): in harbour entrances, harbour approaches and coastal waters, positional information error should not be greater than 10 meters with a probability of 95%. In ocean waters, the system should provide positional information with an error not greater than 100 meters with a probability of 95%.

In 2011, IMO further updated the IMO policy for recognizing and accepting suitable radionavigation systems intended for international use (resolution A.1046(27)), inviting Governments to keep IMO informed of the operational development of any suitable radionavigation systems which might be considered for use by ships worldwide.

The resolution also specifically requested the Maritime Safety Committee to recognize systems conforming to IMO requirements. Such recognition would mean IMO recognizes that the system is capable of providing adequate position information within its coverage area and that the carriage of receiving equipment for use with the system satisfies the relevant requirements of the SOLAS Convention.

New GNSS Providers Recognized
The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), proposed by the People’s Republic of China, was developed in the 2000s and IMO was requested to develop performance standards for BDS receivers. The performance standards were adopted in 2014 (resolution MSC.379(93)).

BDS was recognized as a component of the world-wide radio navigation system in 2014. Full operational capability for BeiDou is anticipated to be reached by 2020. The IMO recognition (SN.1/Circ.329) notes that the static and dynamic accuracy of the system is 100 meters (95%) and it is therefore not suitable for navigation in harbour entrances and approaches, and other waters in which freedom to maneuver is limited.

The European Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System was developed and presented to IMO as a future component of the GNSS in the early 2000s. Performance standards for Galileo shipborne receivers were adopted by IMO in 2006 (resolution MSC.233(82)). The MSC recognized Galileo in 2016 (SN.1/Circ.334), noting that, in future, the static and dynamic accuracy of the Galileo system is expected to be better than 10 meters with a probability of 95%, with integrity provided by Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) techniques. Once full operational capability is met, it will be suitable for navigation in harbour entrances, harbour approaches and coastal waters. Full operational capability for Galileo is also anticipated to be reached by 2020.

A further system, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) — now also known in India as NaVIC (Navigation Indian Constellation) — is now being considered by IMO. Performance standards for IRNSS receiver equipment will be developed by 2019, and its possible recognition as part of the world-wide radio navigation system will be assessed.

Multi-System Shipborne Radio Navigation Receiver Equipment
Meanwhile, in June 2015, the Maritime Safety Committee adopted performance standards for multi-system shipborne radionavigation receiver equipment to ensure that ships are provided with resilient position-fixing equipment suitable for use with available radionavigation systems throughout their voyage (resolution MSC.401(95), updated by MSC.432(98)).

Such equipment can allow the combined use of current and future radionavigation as well as augmentation systems for the provision of position, velocity and time data within the maritime navigation system.

The World-Wide RadioNavigation System for the Future
As technology continues to develop, the world-wide radionavigation system can also be seen in the context of the wider IMO strategy for e-navigation, approved in 2008, which is intended to meet present and future user needs through harmonization of marine navigation systems and supporting shore services.

A key element in the e-navigation strategy relates to position fixing systems, which will need to meet user needs in terms of accuracy, integrity, reliability and system redundancy in accordance with the level of risk and volume of traffic.

A detailed e-navigation Strategy Implementation Plan (SIP), approved in 2014, sets out a framework and a road map of tasks that would need to be implemented or conducted in the future to give effect to five prioritized e-navigation solutions, one of which is the improved reliability, resilience and integrity of bridge equipment and navigation information, and another being the integration and presentation of available information in graphical displays received via communication equipment.

IMO will continue to oversee the world-wide radionavigation system and to have a role in recognizing systems that may be developed in the future. IMO also has a role to ensure the reliability, integrity and resilience of such systems.

The development of satellite-based position systems — GNSS — has enabled a leap forward in the accuracy standards required of such systems and has no doubt contributed to improved safety, efficiency and environmental protection at sea.

This has implications for both carriage requirements for navigational equipment as well as for the human element, in terms of training requirements.

IMO will continue to provide the forum for careful consideration of any requirements, in order to maintain carriage requirements recognizing the significant value and use of GNSS, but also to ensure that alternative systems continue to be mandated, for more resiliency and redundancy.

IMO
The International Maritime Organization – is the United Nations specialized agency with responsibility for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine pollution by ships.

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Like many massive infrastructure projects, the NextGen program has suffered numerous setbacks, many self-inflicted. An August 2016 report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of FAA’s parent, the Department of Transportation, noted, “FAA’s plans have proven to be unrealistic, lacking stable investment priorities and requirements for NextGen systems.”

With more than $7 billion in modernization funds already expended, the FAA is currently projecting costs of $14.8 billion from Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 to 2030, according to the OIG report. Despite the characterization of NextGen as being wildly over budget, however, total cost estimates for the program “have evolved, but not increased markedly since FY 2004,” the OIG says. The president’s proposed FY18 budget requests $988 million for continued NextGen development, down from $1.055 billion in FY17.

As other infrastructure modernization efforts involving GNSS have shown, getting the technology right is the easy part. The Global Positioning System has a 22-year operational history to bolster expectations about its performance, which has continued to improve steadily. The arrival of other GNSS systems has only strengthened this technological resource.

Instead, the sticking points arise from such issues as enterprise architecture, systems integration with other technologies such as data communications and weather forecasting, interagency cooperation, human factors, cybersecurity, operational procedures, and regulatory updates to accommodate modernization.

Like America’s healthcare insurance system, modernization of the National Air Space is more complicated than casual observers might think.

NextGen needs to happen, first, because it will pay off in improved aviation operations, greater capacity, and better use of the crowded National Air Space (NAS). FAA modernization has already provided $2.7 billion in savings from such things as less usage of fuel and is expected to provide another $160 billion in benefits through NextGen’s targeted 2025 completion date.

Efforts so far have barely scratched the surface of what GNSS and other NextGen technologies can provide.

However, the need to get NextGen back on track has gained heightened urgency with the renewed push to privatize U.S. air traffic control (ATC). On June 27, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a measure that would turn the nation’s taxpayer-funded ATC infrastructure and operations (carried out by 30,000 public employees) over to a nonprofit organization controlled by aviation industry representatives.

The measure, previously backed unsuccessfully by House Transportation Committee chairman Bill Shuster, has gained important support from President Donald Trump.

NAS modernization is a perhaps uniquely complicated undertaking with many elements subject to inevitable changes as technologies and operational environments (including the political and economic context) evolve. NextGen is a moving target being shot at from a moving platform.

Attempting to privatize air traffic control at this point in the process would throw a very large monkey wrench into some very delicate works in progress. As Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and committee Vice Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a February 28 letter to Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Sen. John Thune, “If air traffic control were separated during this critical period of technological advancement, the progress already being made to synchronize investment from government and industry related to safety, equipage, training, operational changes, and overall integration would be lost.”

And the FAA, not some newly convened group dominated by stakeholders with their own interests in mind, should continue to lead this project. As a special National Research Council committee concluded in a congressionally mandated analysis of NextGen in 2015, “Replacing or upgrading systems while continuously and safely operating the whole system is an intricate undertaking, a process that the FAA seems to have mastered.”

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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.”

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Long-overdue approval of the request should be expedited by the FCC.

For several years the European Union (EU) has sought a waiver for its Galileo system from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensing requirements — the so-called Part 25 rule to operate in this country.

Long-overdue approval of the request should be expedited by the FCC.

The initial request, channeled through the U.S. State Department, came in October 2013. On January 30, 2015, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) asked the FCC to seek public comment on the EC’s waiver request and recommended granting the exemption to the Galileo system, which met NTIA’s criteria for such waivers.

Nearly two years passed before the FCC, on January 6, issued the public notice sought by NTIA. The comment period closed on March 23 and drew 18 responses, including replies to other submitters’ comments.

The Galileo exemption would apply to three frequencies, but it’s the swath of RF spectrum at 1559–1591 MHz, within which GPS military and civil signals also reside, that are primarily at issue. That GNSS E1/L1 spectrum adjoins a band (1525-1559 MHz) in which Ligado Networks, the successor of LightSquared Inc., would like to build a terrestrial broadband network that has been shown to interfere with many GPS receivers.

Comments made to the FCC strongly favored granting the exemption — with two exceptions. Inmarsat, an international satellite communications organization, raised concerns about out-of-band (OOB) interference from Galileo. Inmarsat and the EC subsequently issued a joint statement supporting a test campaign to assess the risk of OOB interference from Galileo E1 and agreed to mitigate such effects if they appeared.

The other negative response, predictably, came from Ligado Networks, which argued that the waiver should not be granted until after demonstrations that Galileo won’t interfere with Ligado’s proposed operations and that the addition of Galileo would not make user equipment more vulnerable to Ligado’s terrestrial transmissions. 

Given that Ligado’s broadcast power would be much stronger than Galileo’s, the company’s first objection seems rather disingenuous. As for the latter issue, Galileo E1 has long operated within the same frequency as GPS L1 and P(Y)-code and within the same receivers without any substantive problems. Moreover, as the EC pointed out, Galileo has transmitted the PRS signal since 2006 “without reports of interference to systems operating in the band below 1559 MHz.”

In contrast to the limited grounds for denying the Part 25 licensing exemption, several compelling arguments exist for granting it:

National Security. Use of Galileo can further protect critical U.S. infrastructure, such as the national electrical grid and civil aviation, and enhance military operations. In a report attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee urged the FCC to quit fooling around and act on the waiver request.

Foreign Relations. The EU represents one of the United States’ oldest and closest allies, reflected in a 13-year-old agreement that established similarly designed binary offset carrier (BOC) waveforms as the basis for new civil signals at L1/E1: the GPS L1C and Galileo’s Open Service at E1. The U.S.-European relationship is going through a rough patch right now that could be smoothed by granting the Galileo exemption as soon as possible.

Emergency Services. Unauthorized signals cannot be used for official or regulated applications such as law enforcement or 911 services without FCC approval. The EC’s request received support from NENA, the national emergency number association, which argued that additional satellite signals from Galileo would significantly improve 911 services.

GNSS Market Growth. In bilateral and multilateral negotiations the United States has long argued for ensuring a “level playing field” in commercial markets that does not favor one GNSS system over another. Not granting the exemption risks tit-for-tat treatment of GPS by other nations with their own GNSS systems. 

GPS Protection/Backup. In 2010 the Obama administration adopted a space policy that said foreign GNSS services could be used “to augment and strengthen the resiliency of GPS.” Use of Galileo would aid detection of spoofing, improve interference rejection, and provide a needed GPS backup. It’s time for the FCC to move ahead and grant the Galileo request.

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