Everyone wants a drone that can fly without GPS.

That is only part of the problem.

GPS is one member of the broader family of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) alongside systems like Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia), and BeiDou (China). These constellations transmit ridicously weak radio signals from thousands of miles away to provide Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services.

Put a decent transmitter nearby on the same frequencies, and the receiver can no longer hear the satellites.

That’s jamming.

There are plenty of ways to make a platform more resilient to jamming.

A controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA) can electronically suppress interference coming from the direction of a jammer. Better receivers can reject interference and identify spoofed signals.

If GNSS disappears entirely, a good inertial navigation system (INS) can continue estimating position, though its error grows over time—but AI products exist to minimize this drift.

There are also ways to periodically correct that drift.

Visual navigation can compare imagery against known terrain databases. Multiple aircraft can compare their relative positions (called Receiver-to-Receiver (R2R)), while a C2 network can even pass updated position information from the ground station to the vehicle.

Ukraine has become a laboratory for many of these approaches, and while successful, it may provide the wrong lesson for the casual observer.

Some of the most widely used (and successful) GNSS-denied approaches in Ukraine have little to no applicability in the Pacific.

And it’s much broader than “visual nav over water doesn’t work.”

Nearly all of the GNSS-denied technologies used in Ukraine attack the problem at the platform level—which misses the larger issue.

GNSS does not just tell a drone “where it is”, it also tells it “when it is.”

That’s the “T” in PNT, and often the least appreciated part.

Precise time synchronizes radios, datalinks, sensors, communications networks, and distributed command-and-control systems. [it also provides timing precision for global finance].

These applications operate with synchronization measured in microseconds and nanoseconds (that’s millionths of a second and billionths of a second, respectively).

The “T” in PNT is also provides a datum required to orchestrate actions across nodes, from kill-chains to kill-webs to theatre-level operations.

Imagine a drone navigating visually, determining a target's coordinates, and sending them to another system. The drone has one estimate of where it is. The receiver may be operating from another. The shooter may have a third. The weapon may have a fourth.

Each system can still function as advertised—yet the force no longer shares the same “where” or “when” because they have no datum reference.

This manifests as a low-accuracy, low-precision dilemma, and this is the real GNSS-denied problem.

Almost all “GPS-denied” technology only solves “P” and “N” problems on individual platforms.

Very few solutions provide a common, independent PNT datum that can be distributed across an entire theater to synchronize operations.

To be continued…

Swiss weather firm Meteomatics flew a quadcopter to a record 34,245 feet.

Equipped with heated propellers and sensors, it acted as a weather balloon and even handled 80 mph winds.

A quadcopter at those altitudes has significant defense considerations.

TRIVIA

On this day in 1958, newly formed NASA launched its first spacecraft, Pioneer 1. What happened to it?

A) reached the moon
B) stuck in orbit
C) fell back to Earth
D) blew up on the launch pad

GPS gets a ground reset. After canceling RTX’s OCX GPS ground-control overhaul in April—10 years late and carrying a $6.27B price tag—the backup plan became the main plan. The Space Force has awarded Lockheed Martin $199M to upgrade the existing system to support next-gen GPS IIIF satellites launching in 2028.

Counter-drone energy shortlist. The Pentagon picked four vendors for its homeland-defense directed-energy pilot: AV, Kord, and Boeing bring lasers; Epirus brings its Leonidas high-power microwave system. JIATF-401 will run a December shoot-off and the laser contenders bring different strengths: AV’s 20 kW P-HEL has overseas operating experience, Kord’s Firefly emphasizes self-contained power and cooling with field-replaceable components, and Boeing has demonstrated Group 3 drone kills with a comparatively modest 5 kW system. Exact configurations for the pilot haven’t been disclosed.

“If we can’t make a million drones a year, we can’t practice with a million drones a year; we’re not learning how to handle a million drones a year.”

— Jon Strzelec, advanced manufacturing lead for small uncrewed air systems at Army Materiel Command, on retooling six Army depots for drone component production

ICYMI

The Pentagon office in charge of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (OASW(SO/LIC)) launched an accelerator as a new way to engage companies.

The next event is in December.

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ANSWER
C) Pioneer 1 was launched using a Thor-Able rocket, which repurposed a Thor IRBM as the first stage and a Vanguard Able rocket as the second stage. A programming error led to a trajectory error, and it lacked the thrust to escape Earth’s orbit. Instead, it traveled nearly 70,000 miles into space before falling back to Earth over the Pacific Ocean.