Raytheon Landshield: protecting against spoofers and jammers
Electronic warfare techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated at impacting and incapacitating the mission effectiveness of operational platforms. Military reliance on Global Navigation Satellite Systems, or GNSS, for operations has led…
Electronic warfare techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated at impacting and incapacitating the mission effectiveness of operational platforms. Military reliance on Global Navigation Satellite Systems, or GNSS, for operations has led to an increase in both intentional and unintentional interference using GPS jammers to undermine and disrupt enemy positioning, navigation and timing systems.
The risks to the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, or C4ISR, spectrum are also increased through spoofing – techniques which make systems appear to drift off their navigation position.
Tackling the rise in spoofing
Ships can be spoofed off-course, hijacked and pirated by adversaries, while the good guys could spoof an incoming missile, ensuring that it doesn’t reach its primary target. Spoofing is undermining confidence in current military systems and Raytheon UK has been working with colleagues to develop the next-generation of anti-jamming products designed with this in mind.
FINN took a closer look at Raytheon’s Landshield system at IDEX in Abu Dhabi. Raytheon UK Vice President Josh Chartier explained: “Landshield is our kind of next generation anti-jam capability that’s going to protect our friendly and allied systems, GPS systems, from that jamming capability.”
He added: “Landshield provides protection for your GPS signals and your GPS systems to give you accurate position navigation and timing, so that you can be confident in the position that you have, and you know where you are.”
System identifies fake GPS signals
Raytheon’s Landshield and Landshield Plus, identify the origins of the jamming signal and can block it, pulling in correct, accurate feeds from the other GPS satellites. The system ensures there is accurate position navigation timing,
Landshield can also identify fake GPS signals and can block or ignore them and use an accurate satellite signal for the correct position location. The system can handle up to six different jamming entities. The system is adaptable to manned and unmanned aircraft platforms as well as ground platforms, and additionally to other weapon systems that may need GPS accuracy.
Chartier explained how Raytheon intends to stay one step ahead of adversaries: “This is just something that we’re continuing to evolve on and our engineers and team continues to determine what the current threat is what to cabilities are and then are continuing to evolve to what the next generation threats are to our GPS systems.”
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