“To Counteract Russia and China”: US Introduces Antennas to Protect GPS Signal
GPS has actually become the "gold standard" for satellite navigation and target designation. However, modern electronic warfare equipment is able to drown out the signal or give a false one, misleading the signal receiver, which can lead to fatal consequences.
GPS, GLONASS, Chinese Beidou play a huge role in the modern battlefield. Without them, it is difficult to imagine high-precision ammunition, ships will have to return to traditional methods of navigation, and troops will have to find the point to which you must follow. However, for fighters - especially the 4 ++ and 5-th generation, as well as UAVs - GPS is not just a convenience, but a fundamentally important part of the combat system.
To counter Russia and China
The Pentagon, which recently considers the fight against an equal or superior opponent as a priority - and China and Russia are identified as potential enemies - decided to respond to a possible problem. Realizing the superiority of Moscow in the field of electronic warfare, the military department, together with the US military-industrial complex, developed a system that will allow fighters to receive a GPS signal even when it is jammed.
At the heart of the future noise-immune navigation and target designation system are technologies for creating an antenna with a controlled radiation pattern in the vertical plane or CRPA. The principle of operation of such antennas is quite simple in theory. The signals arriving at the receiving device usually have a different appearance due to the passage of different distances in the atmosphere. In addition, along the way, the signals are distorted and come at different angles. All this allows their selection to be made, highlighting useful ones, and weakening those that interfere.
- commented Tyler Hohman, director of products for Orolia Defense & Security, his vision of the situation.
The main thing is calibration
The product requested by the army itself is already ready. However, the process of introducing technology, which should be installed on thousands of platforms in the near future, remains a fundamental issue for the Pentagon. The US military should determine if the technology works with platforms that the Pentagon already has or is about to acquire in the near future. And then modern modeling and simulation programs come to the forefront that can calibrate the system without sending antennas to the laboratory.
At the annual conference of the US Army Association, which opened on October 14, Orolia demonstrated the new BroadSim Wavefront simulator. According to Hochman, the company has already sold one such simulator to the army and expects to complete the delivery by the end of the year. The army will use the simulator to calibrate mounted and dismantled next-generation communications systems.
The company claims in the third quarter military orders for solutions in the field of so-called elastic (fail-safe) positioning, navigation and synchronization (PNT) almost tripled as the US Army pays more and more attention to anti-spoofing technology. PNT fault tolerance assumes that no data source can be completely reliable, so the answer lies in combining them into a single whole.
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