13 September 2019

DSEI 2019: Raytheon reveals GPS anti-jamming antennas

by Giles Ebbutt

Raytheon UK has developed new GPS antennas designed to mitigate GPS jamming and spoofing, and it showcased them at the 2019 Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition (DSEI 2019) in London in September.

Rowland Wright, Raytheon UK business development manager for assured position, navigation, and timing (APNT), told Jane’s that Landshield and Landshield Plus are GPS receiver antennas designed to defeat intentional jamming and spoofing, and unintended mutual interference. These can be fitted to “any” platform either as a retrofit to replace existing antennas or for new programmes, they are ITAR-free, and all the intellectual property belongs to Raytheon UK.

Landshield has a four-element antenna array and the larger Landshield Plus has a seven-element array. The antennas work by using steerable null technology, detecting the direction of jamming and then creating a null in the antenna’s receive pattern to minimise the jamming effect. Spoofing is defeated by detecting that all the spoof signals originate from the same location, unlike genuine GPS signals that originate from numerous satellites in different positions in the constellation.

Wright noted that when a number of platforms, particularly vehicles in the land domain, are fitted with Landshield integrating them in a network could provide a direction-finding capability. Triangulation on the direction of the jamming or spoofing signal between Landshield antennas on vehicles in different locations would provide the location of its origin.