Beginning in September, Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRPA), a highly effective anti-jam technique, will no longer fall under stringent International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)—finally opening the market to U.S. manufacturers and expanding use of the technology.
CRPAs for PNT will instead fall under the less restrictive Export Administration Regulations (EAR) list that’s under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce, what GNSS/GPS expert Logan Scott describes as a significant change and a huge step in the right direction. Items on the ITAR list include defense articles, services and technical data, while EAR covers dual-use commercial items, what CRPAs for PNT are now considered.
The Department of State announced amendments to the ITAR list last week. The rule, in part, removes items from the U.S. Munitions List (USML) “that no longer warrant inclusion.” According to the amendment, “certain anti-jam antennas no longer provide a critical military advantage, with increasing commercial utilization applicable to civil GPS resiliency.” By removing CRPAs for PNT, “the Department intends to facilitate civil global navigation system resiliency.”
“The first key is it makes them available,” Scott said of the rule change. “You’re not going to be able to buy them at Walmart or on Amazon, they’ll still be export controlled, but not on the munitions list.”
Scott described CRPAs as “the single most capable anti-jam technique available for ensuring reception of GNSS signals” that provide “orders of magnitude more capability than any other technique.” CRPAs not only can detect jamming and mitigate it, they can geolocate spoofing and jamming attacks as well.
CRPAs attack the problem directly, Scott said, creating a very dep null in the direction of the jamming and providing a “40, 50 dbs kind of advantage.” That reduces the jammer’s effective range by a factor of 100.
“These are the big guns of anti-jam,” Scott said. “As long as GNSS satellites are up, these allow you to continue to operate, so a lot of the nonsense going on in the Middle East and Ukraine will go away.”
Airlines are going to be the early beneficiaries of this change, Scott said. Before, putting a CRPA on an airplane made the entire airplane an ITAR item that required an export license. That won’t be an issue anymore, though there are other challenges to using CRPAs, such as their size and power consumption.
Autonomous vehicles and UAVs will also benefit, Scott said, with CRPAs allowing them to rely on GPS even in conflict adjacent areas.
“Any safety of life application can benefit from adaptable phased arrays,” Scott said. “Basically, anyone concerned about being interfered with or spoofed, so any critical infrastructure application can benefit.”
Cost is another challenge, Scott said, but he expects that to come down “very rapidly.”
“The key impact this is going to have, is the U.S. will now get into this business,” Scott said. “The barrier to entry before was huge, so adaptive arrays were typically made in places like Canada and Turkey. This will open up the industry and the application to the U.S. industry base, and we know how to do this stuff pretty well.”
You can find the full rule here.