GPS on the fritz? Britain and France plot a backup plan
Britain and France are to work more closely on technology to back up the familiar Global Positioning System (GPS), which is increasingly subject to interference in many regions around the world.
The Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) announced the move along with a number of other joint UK-France science and technology efforts to coincide with the state visit by French President Macron.
It said that experts from both countries will work to increase the resilience of critical infrastructure to the kind of signal-jamming that has been seen in the war in Ukraine, which has rendered GPS largely useless anywhere near the front line.
While created for the American military as a way of pinpointing the position of a receiving device anywhere on Earth to within a few meters, it has also been widely adopted for a variety of civilian purposes.
These include the familiar car satnav, but the highly accurate timing information provided by GPS satellites also makes it useful for applications such as time-stamping business transactions.
It is these kinds of domestic infrastructure applications the British and French efforts will primarily seek to safeguard, providing a standby in case the satellite service should be unavailable or degraded for some reason.
DSIT says the researchers will focus on so-called positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) technologies which are complementary to GPS, but more resistant to jamming.
One of the systems being considered is eLoran (enhanced long-range navigation), a terrestrial-based system that uses ground-based radio towers operating within the 90-110 kHz low frequency band, which is said to be much more challenging to block.
The use of low frequency bands enables signals to travel long distances into areas that satellite-based PNT systems cannot reach, such as inside buildings.
It’s no coincidence that eLoran is a prime candidate, as it is a development of technology used by the military in the past. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) also issued a Request for Information (RFI) last year for a portable eLoran network comprising a minimum of three transmitters that can be transported in a shipping container for deployment in the field.
The British government also issued a tender in May for a contractor to build and operate a nationally owned eLoran PNT system within the UK, suggesting a decision on the technology may already has been made.
Perhaps minds in the UK and France have been focused by the growing interference with GPS signals in various regions. Most recently, the Swedish Maritime Administration warned of interference in the Baltic Sea, stating: “For some time now, the signals have been affected by interference, which means that the system’s position cannot be trusted.”
Russia has been implicated in some of these incidents, such as the jamming of GPS signals reported by Bulgarian pilots in the Black Sea and similar events reported by Romania.
Last year, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) claimed that GPS interference is now a major flight safety concern, and stated that jamming and spoofing (in which fake signals produce a misleading location) incidents were recorded across Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years. ®
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