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Among the technical approaches being researched this year for GNSS/PNT protection, which do you consider most effective or promising?
“The simple answer is what I have been saying many times before. The most effective way to back up GPS/GNSS is to use the terrestrial technology available from eLoran. It is affordable, long-range, precise and essentially unjammable. However, it’s not what I would call ‘promising’ because that’s not what the government wants to hear. In fact, the government is in the process of dismantling the existing Loran infrastructure that could easily be recapitalized as autonomous eLoran stations. eLoran could provide robust nationwide timing and positioning preservation, including in the northern Pacific Ocean and Alaska, as well as across the Arctic, with Canada, to link up with our allies in the UK and Europe, who are also investing in eLoran. There is no real commercial market in the far north and there are no commercial systems proposed that can provide such coverage in those areas where we are facing challenges from Russia and China today and that will only increase into the future.”
— Jules McNeff
“L-band jamming and spoofing is now prevalent in many parts of the world. It has now been confirmed that space-based jammers have been active, as well as conventional terrestrial jamming. Anti-jam solutions can only provide protection up to a certain jammer power level and are not a ‘silver bullet’ solution. Moreover, nulling of space-based jammers will also have the effect of nulling parts of the sky where GPS satellites are in view, degrading performance by reducing DOP. Alternative PNT solutions that are not relying on L-band signals are the most effective solution for operations in highly contested, jammed or spoofed L-band environments.”
— Allison Brown
“I believe that both orbital and ground-based PNT systems, operating in tandem and integrated properly, are the ultimate solution for critical infrastructure applications, but to get there, ‘the budget-office-inspired problem’ of having to pick one and only one must be abandoned: prevention is usually cheaper than curation. Only after space-based and ground-based PNT designers, developers, regulators and users understand and welcome the essential nature of PNT source diversity will we actually achieve the resilient PNT capabilities that we all need.”
— Mitch Narins
