Participating in the European Commission’s recent Joint Research Centre (JRC) alternative positioning, navigation, and timing (APNT) evaluation in Ispra, Italy, NextNav demonstrated its capabilities in an environment free of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), “including instances of outages, spoofing, and jamming.”
“The trials conducted…on behalf of the European Commission are part of the global trend to develop a resilience layer to space-based GPS/GNSS systems that is more secure and available,” said NextNav CEO Ganesh Pattabiraman.
The tests are designed to help the European Union develop a reliable backup to the GNSS, which relies on global positioning system (GPS) and Galileo satellite networks for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. Research on suitable backups is underway in the U.S. as well. The goal is to develop a backup for PNT that is independent of GNSS.
According to NextNav, “As a part of the trial, NextNav also demonstrated its capabilities in providing both indoor and outdoor ‘z-axis’ vertical location.”
“We are redefining the capabilities of APNT technologies,” Pattabiraman said, “and look forward to working with the European Commission on furthering these initiatives to build a GNSS-backup layer that can deliver highly-precise PNT across use-cases.”
Industries such as aviation, shipping, logistics, agriculture, and others are increasingly relying on GNSS-based PNT services, and estimates put the contribution to the European gross domestic product at 10 percent.