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:
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.