Helix’s CTO Oliver Leisten spent his usual few weeks in Norway investigating what is new with respect to signal interference and jamming for resilient PNT.
This year’s Jammertest was a little different, a little spicier.
Having previously been on the receiving end of some of our Norwegian hosts best jamming waveforms, including the now infamous Porkus Major, we were all prepared with CRPx our latest generation of CRPA for the 2025 event.
CRPx is the market leader in size, weight and power, and total of 12 nulls across a full multi-band, L1, L2 (m-code) , L5 and E5 and multi-constellation. With both nulling and beamforming, the aim is to deliver the highest C/No to a GNSS receiver at a price point enabling PNT resilience over the broadest possible market.
The game was definitely upped compared to previous years with the additional involvement of a ‘specialist’ team from Finland. What we experienced was an increased number of test scenarios combining jamming, spoofing and meaconing.
The tests on Day 1 started gently with high power jammers designed to simply overpower and de-linearise the front end of the GNSS receivers and CRPAs. This is something we excel at with CRPx and so we take these attacks in our stride with a jammer to signal ratio of 110dB. Also is the line-up of basic level attacks come the classical space time adaptive processing attacks, using swept frequencies designed to jam the STAP based processing of RADAR and CRPAs. Again, the CRPx novel architecture is by the nature its design very robust to this category of attacks.
But as the days progressed things got really warmed up and we saw a greater emphasis on spoofing and meaconing attacks. Our experience is when properly protected the latest generation of GNSS receivers can do a very good job of distinguishing between genuine signals and spoofed signals. At Helix it’s core to our resilience philosophy to present signals to GNSS receivers in a way not to impair this ability. This is not true of all CRPA architectures, particular those that re-synthesise GNSS signals.
These ‘military grade’ attacks are more insidious, often combining power jamming and low power prn and spoofing insertion below the noise floor of a simple CRPA architecture. Our test set-up which was comparing an unprotected GNSS receiver to one protected with CRPx demonstrated the effectiveness of CRPx in all but one test scenario. With our pride a little dented, we have subsequently been told by many participants that this was an exceptional result for Jammertest 25.
Now back home the team has been very busy analysing the terabytes of trial data and updating the threat data base.
PNT resilience is rapidly becoming like the world of anti-virus. Without being exposed to viruses you can’t build a strong immune system.
Thanks to the Jammertest team for giving us the opportunity to further raise the bar of PNT resilience.
Written by David Leftley
Helix focuses on high performance antenna technology for satellite communications and resilient PNT (Position, Navigation and Timing). With variants for GPS, Galileo GNSS constellations and the Iridium LEO satcomms constellation, Helix antennas are multifrequency resonant devices with tightly targeted frequency discrimination. They utilise multiple helical conductor filaments on a high dielectric constant ceramic core. The selective nature of the design assures integrity of data delivered to the receiver enabling positional accuracy to 10cm to be computed, and high levels of resilience against environmental and deliberate disruption. The helical antenna resonance means that troublesome reflected signals, typical of modern cities’ ‘urban canyons’ are ignored, while the on-frequency accuracy makes the system resilient to ‘noisy neighbour’ spectrum interference and deliberate jamming. All this comes in a compact and robust form factor light enough for drones and small enough for vehicle aesthetics. Using this best-in-class antenna technology enables the CRPx anti-jamming/spoofing systems deliver the optimum defence against malicious attempts to undermine satellite navigation and communications with the best SWaP-C.
Please contact us if you have any questions.
