Speaking at the recent Munich Satellite Navigation Summit, Mark Brammer, Positioning Program Lead for the UK’s National PNT Office, outlined the United Kingdom’s bold vision for the future of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), a system built not on a single pillar, but on international cooperation, multi-technology fusion, and a clear-eyed view of GNSS resilience.
“The UK system of systems starts with the assumption that, for now, space GNSS systems are the primary provider of global PNT,” Brammer said. “There is no walking away from that.” At the same time, he said, nations must not become complacent. “No country, no government, no economy should be using those systems without understanding what’s going on in their environment,” he said.
That imperative led to the establishment of the UK National Crisis Prevention Plan, which has delivered a 24/7 national multi-PNT monitoring and receiving system. “It goes through our Space Operations Center and provides real-time, minute-by-minute pulse assessment of PNT performance, both in space and on the ground, including jamming alerts,” Brammer said.
Citing real-world examples, he pointed to local incidents where jammers have been used in criminal activities, from car theft to disabling security systems during burglaries. “We’ve operationalized the understanding of our environment,” Brammer said, noting that the monitoring infrastructure is being upgraded to include future systems like eLoran and LEO-PNT.
Yet even with these new layers, the fundamental challenge remains – dependency on GNSS for network timing and power grid synchronization. “We start from the position of wanting to make UK PNT GNSS resilient,” Brammer said, “but everything we do to do that will not use GNSS.”
Instead, Britain is investing heavily in complementary and independent capabilities. The National Timing Centre, for instance, aims to deliver picosecond accuracy over a distributed network. “It becomes the metronome that runs everything else,” Brammer said.
Moving forward together
Meanwhile, the UK’s terrestrial eLoran system is being fused with GNSS, and, crucially, is benefitting from international partnerships. “I have to do a call-out right now for the European Space Agency’s Navigation Innovation Support Program (NAVISP),” Brammer said. “Absolutely phenomenal, to let us work with incredible European partners, scientists, and engineers.”
He praised specific innovations sourced through NAVISP collaborations, such as a Madrid-invented device for banking timing and a Czech Republic timing project he called “better than anything else we’ve seen right now.
In one of the most exciting developments, QinetiQ’s world-first robust high-performance GNSS fusion chip, originally designed for defense, is now being trialed in LEO-PNT applications through NAVISP, in cooperation with Xona Space Systems. The goal is to integrate the chip’s resilient multi-PNT capabilities with Xona’s PULSAR LEO constellation.
“We’re investing in LEO capabilities that don’t use GNSS at all,” Brammer said, “getting out of that band, doing things that aren’t complementary – they’re standalone. Complementary helps something else. You need independence first of all.”
