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Session D8: PNT Situational Awareness 1

NAVWAR Situational Awareness and Jammer Geolocation
David Easterling and Andrew Thompson, University of Dayton Research Institute; Michael Corey and William Deike, AFRL/RYWN
Location: Ballroom D
Date/Time: Thursday, Jun. 15, 8:55 a.m.

The DoD is investing in enabling warfighters to survive, persist, and thrive in “contested” environments through novel technologies. Positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) concerns have resulted in significant investments to harden GNSS receivers and antennas against navigation warfare (NAVWAR) threats. These initiatives have focused more on protection of receiver solution quality and less on informing the warfighter about specific threats their navigation units may be experiencing during a mission. As a result, aircrews have unsuitable situational awareness into their navigation system health and performance, and they lack insight or feedback about environmental NAVWAR threats. This lack of situational awareness can compromise mission objectives by leaving operators completely in the dark as to whether their navigation units are being attacked and what impact that has on their current mission.
This technology developed and briefed aims to supplement warfighter situational awareness by providing real-time insight into the NAVWAR environment. Previous efforts have attempted to address this lack of situational awareness by providing the operator with simple breadcrumbs indicating previously experienced jamming at a specific point. These solutions are often platform specific and do not perform any higher level analysis of the threat environment. In this talk, we address the fusion of multiple diverse NAVWAR sensors such as Agile Meridian, Furthermore, this effort demonstrates interpolation techniques to develop a more comprehensive GNSS interference heat map visualization than simple measurements at points previously demonstrated in Agile Meridian.
This effort discusses the use of omni-directional antennas and a Novatel single antenna receiver to detect interference on GNSS bands. The algorithm leveraged operates by minimizing the mean-square error between observed interference measurements and solution emitters calculated by a free-space path loss equation. Search and optimization is performed via a non-derivative simplex based approach which allows for simple parallelization and results in near-realtime solution finding of likely jammer location. Breadcrumbs, lines-of-bearing, heat-maps, and jammer locations are formatted as Keyhole Markup Language (KML) allowing for standardized, portable data sharing without the need to write substantial plugins for common operating pictures via import functionality. For this talk, results are rendered using Google Earth.
This briefing will discuss progress made in fusing diverse GNSS health monitoring systems. Additionally we will discuss results and key findings from testing this effort at multiple live jamming ground test events on standard commodity laptops. Finally we will discuss relevant future work in this domain.

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