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Session A11: Satellite Experimentation: Commercial Satellite Sources 1

Collins Aerospace Software Defined Receiver and Analysis for the Xona PULSAR System
Dave Anderson, Michael Armatys, Collins Aerospace
Location: Room 1-3
Date/Time: Wednesday, Jun. 3, 2:10 p.m.

Navigating in the presence of GPS jamming and spoofing is one of the major challenges facing the warfighter today. The navigation industry has produced many sensors to aid or replace GPS, but none to-date provide a service as ubiquitous as GPS. New Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations like PULSAR service being deployed by Xona Space Systems promises to provide global coverage to augment and backup GPS but with higher signal power and advanced waveform features to reduce the probability of signal spoofing. PULSAR presents a unique opportunity for military as well as commercial applications and Collins Aerospace has chosen to develop an SDR-based PULSAR receiver for incorporation into future Collins PNT and communications products.
Collins Aerospace is a leading manufacturer of military and commercial avionics based on flexible, Software Define Radio (SDR) platforms. For PULSAR, Collins has developed the Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) SDR. Leveraging decades of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) software development for the commercial avionics market, the Collins team transformed PNT SDR into a Xona PULSAR receiver. With PULSAR’s GNSS-like signal structure, existing GNSS receivers are obvious candidates for early PULSAR User Equipment (UE) platforms. The Collins team extensively used the code base for the Collins GLU-2100 commercial GNSS receiver, a certified GNSS receiver on roughly 80% of commercial air transport platforms, porting the code to the SCISR’s FPGA target hardware.
Xona Space Systems launched their first satellite, PULSAR-0, in June 2025. Through extensive code reuse and the flexible SDR, Collins was able to track PULSAR-0 from Cedar Rapids, IA as soon as it was available to the User Equipment (UE) community.
The All-Doman Persistent Experiment (APEX) 2024 at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) presented the first opportunity to test the Collins PNT SDR with PULSAR-0 in the presence of jamming. The PNT SDR was able to successfully aquire and track the PULSAR-0 signal in challenging GPS jamming environments with only a Fixed Radiation Pattern Antenna (FRPA) and wideband L-band front end.
Collins is now planning to attend the Army’s Degraded, Denied, Intermittent, and Low-bandwidth (DDIL) Integrated Environment Supporting Experimentation and Learning, or DIESEL, event at WSMR in February 2026 with upgraded SDR software and an antenna to ehance PULSAR tracking in the presence of jamming.
This presentation includes the latest in SDR development and live sky tracking results in the presence of jamming from APEX 2025 and DIESEL 2026.

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