GPS technology developer oneNav has announced the successful results of a test of its technology’s resilience to widespread GPS interference. The tests took place in and around Haifa, Israel, and examined the performance of its L5-direct GPS receiver against the performance of GPS receivers in leading smartphone and smartwatch brands.
For this test, oneNav compared its L5-direct GPS receiver to receivers found in iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel smartphones and Garmin watches. While these receivers all experienced navigation failure due to GPS interference, oneNav’s L5-direct test solution maintained accurate location fixes despite active jamming and spoofing.
This resilience is due to L5-direct being able to directly acquire L5 GPS signals, and bypass the L1 GPS signal which was first invented more than 50 years ago. While current commercial GPS receivers in smartphones, car navigation systems, and airplanes are able to process the L5 band, they can only do so in a hybrid system that must first acquire L1.
L5-band signals are 30x harder to jam and interfere with compared to L1, and they offer superior performance in difficult-to-navigate areas such as urban canyons and tree-covered regions.
“We now have clear, indisputable evidence that L5-direct is resilient to widespread GPS jamming and is able to provide precision location in GPS-contested environments,” said oneNav CEO Steve Poizner. “This test is a real-world validation of our first-of-its-kind technology and shows the potential for L5-direct to revolutionize how we use GPS for civilian and military purposes in Israel and globally.”
While the field testing took place in Israel, GPS interference is a global security concern due to the increase in attacks on GPS systems worldwide. In Ukraine, Russia is countering American-made smart weapons on the battlefield through GPS-jamming technology and is accused of interfering with GPS navigation systems in more than 46,000 flights across Europe.
“As our adversaries’ GPS jamming capabilities become more sophisticated, the need to modernize this crucial technology could not be clearer,” said oneNav Advisory Board Member Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (Ret.), also a Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Make no mistake, GPS interference can happen in any war zone and even our domestic critical infrastructures are at risk. As evidenced by oneNav’s groundbreaking field study, the United States has the technology to combat these threats, we just need to implement it.”
oneNav’s IP core is currently available for evaluation and integration by select chip developer partners and its low-SWaP (space, weight and power) chips and modules will soon be available for select partners. L5-direct is compatible with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) constellations including GPS, Galileo, BeiDou and more.
