Honeywell Expands Its Anti-Jamming Navigation Toolkit

Jamming and spoofing have made global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals less dependable, and Honeywell Aerospace is answering with an expanding menu of alternatives. At a recent JamFest demonstration event in Barcelona, Spain, the Phoenix-based company showcased smaller-form, unlicensed products—spanning radar velocity, visual, and low-earth-orbit (LEO) navigation—that build on its inertial navigation systems (INS) expertise.

“There’s no one silver bullet with alternative navigation modalities,” explained Darren Fisher, a founding member of Honeywell’s HGuide navigation business unit. The world has “really sat up and noticed” the effect of deliberate spoofing or jamming on traditional GNSS signals over the past five years, Fisher said, making it useful to mix navigation methods and give customers “an à la carte approach” based on mission requirements. That flexibility matters because each method carries limitations tied to terrain, weather, and size or weight.

Much of the technology on display at the fourth annual JamFest last month was scaled toward smaller drones, but it could evolve to fit other aircraft. This includes Honeywell’s proprietary ground control station (GCS), through which an operator can oversee multiple drones. “When we’re designing the technology, the foundation is agnostic to the segment, and that’s the biggest benefit,” explained Tomas Szaszi, senior director of technology and strategy. “When the application comes—be it commercial or defense—then we start to tweak that foundation into something very specific.”

The internet-connected GCS terminal is designed to improve efficiency and autonomy. After filing a flight plan, an operator oversees a drone along its pre-programmed trajectory, with the system set to flag events such as sudden airspace closures, restrictions, or intruder drones. Operators can also hand control to other remote GCS units, either deliberately or automatically if a system outage occurs. “The system is set up to be certified, and that’s our mission today,” said Martin Miehling, Honeywell’s European account manager for UAM and UAS. A commercially available beta version is already in customers’ hands, and Honeywell is “evolving and adding functionality” to it.

Non-GNSS Navigation Technologies

However, whether for drone or potential future eVTOL applications, the GCS’s ability to accurately pinpoint an aircraft’s position is crucial. One trick up Honeywell’s sleeve is its Radar Velocity System, which uses radar panels to measure velocity and supplement inertial navigation. Now in its second iteration after about two years on the market, the scalable system is designed primarily for “smaller, lighter, and much more attritable platforms,” Honeywell said.

Four updated radar boards drawing more power have extended the system’s range from 300 meters to 1,000 meters and added a waterproof connection. They connect to a Honeywell INS/GNSS box about the size of a credit card, which removes the need for heavier, more expensive sensors. Overall, the team expects a three- or four-meter margin of error over a three-kilometer flight.

Another alternative under consideration for smaller drones is the use of LEO satellites. A signal from a GNSS satellite in medium earth orbit can be susceptible to intentional or accidental jamming, but a LEO signal is much stronger by the time it reaches the ground. “If someone would want to jam that signal, they would need to pump a lot more radio frequency into the atmosphere, and as that’s more challenging to do, the signal becomes more resilient,” Fisher explained.

Complementing this is what Honeywell describes as a unique approach to visual-aided navigation, in which an infrared signal from a camera is mapped and matched to a known daytime image. The end user loads a reference map—typically from a public source—and the system overlays the drone’s live pixel feed onto it to confirm position. Mission-planning software can also build key navigation features into a drone’s flight plan.

These capabilities, Fisher said, let users move from optimal conditions—albeit within a GNSS-denied environment—to nighttime or other challenging situations. If no map is available, or the drone is crossing repetitive terrain such as dense forest or featureless desert, the system can switch back to radar velocity. Its “tightly coupled structure,” which uses direct signals, “gives us more flexibility when satellite ability drops down, and we’re not reliant on a minimum satellite count for navigation,” he explained.