About

GAMMA Concept

The idea behind GAMMA


The use of GNSS receivers is wide spread in the society today. The surveying industry uses GNSS for monitoring the continental drift, stakeout fixed-points, measuring maps of areas and many other location based services. The construction industry uses GNSS for machine control and logistics, agriculture for precise farming, power steering assists and other tasks like bringing out manure, harvesting and plowing. Over the last 10 years GNSS has also entered many daily life applications like car navigation and location based services (Google Maps, Facebook). But GNSS is also used as a solution for many safety-critical applications: typical examples are landing approach of airplanes as well as a crucial solution for timing and synchronization of reference stations for telecommunication, electrical power supplies, exchange markets and banks.

For many years, the availability and faultless function of GNSS has been taken for granted. Jamming (intentional interference targeting the unavailability of the system) as well as spoofing (faking of a false position/time towards a target GNSS receiver) was no concern for nearly all users except the military. But this paradigm is shifting in the recent years.

There are examples in the literature over the past years when jammers have been used and affected GPS receivers, both purposely and accidentally. Examples of GPS jamming incidents:


  • Biskopstorp, Oct. 18 2011 : People reported that GPS and mobile phones did not work in an area in southern Sweden. Jammers were used to prevent the stolen properties (such as boat engines and car tires) from being tracked.
  • Newark airport, Aug. 3 2012: Technicians had been experiencing interference during pre- deployment testing of a ground-based augmentation system (GBAS). A signal emanating from a vehicle were blocking the reception of GPS signals in the GBAS. The driver claimed that he installed and operated the jamming device in his company supplied vehicle to block the GPS-based vehicle tracking system that his employer installed in the vehicle.
  • San Diego, 2007: Two navy ships in the San Diego harbor conducted a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites. A big part of central San Diego was affected. The system for tracking incoming planes at the airport was malfunctioning, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors at the Naval Medical Center stopped working, the traffic management system used for guiding boats in the harbor failed, about 150 base stations were malfunctioning and cellphones did not work, and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused.
  • North Korea: GPS jamming has been performed in military exercises along the border on three documented occasions in March 2011, and in August and December of 2010. In addition, GPS jamming was performed in 2012 during April 28 and May 13. A large number of aircrafts and ships were affected.
  • Iran–U.S. RQ-170 incident: a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was captured by the Iranian military using a GPS spoofer in December of 2011. Having first been denied, this incident was confirmed a few days later by US military sources. The attack was successful because no military GPS was used


GNSS jamming attacks are increasing in frequency also in Europe: a jammer monitoring campaign at two highway gantries around Munich, Germany reported approx. 6 jamming incidents a week, whereas one monitored carriageway outside London, UK is reported with 10 jamming incidents a day.

Recently, the Consortium composed by KE Elektronik, Thales Alenia Space-Italia, SpaceEXE and Business Integration Partners S.p.A. won the call launched within the EU R&D funding programme ‘Fundamental Elements’ which supports the development of EGNSS-enabled chipsets, receivers and antennas. The Fundamental Elements related projects are part of the overall European GNSS strategy for market uptake.

In this context, a Galileo-based multi-purpose and multi-frequency antenna is under development. Such device is expected to deliver an anti-spoofing and anti-jamming low-dynamic/static capabilities, able to counteract the effect of such threats on the GNSS signal and consequently improve critically the performance (such as accuracy, availability, robustness, integrity) of the receivers connected to the antenna and the whole system.

Share by: