Lockheed Martin received a $25 million initial contract award for engineering and manufacturing development for the GPS Spatial Temporal Anti-Jam Receiver (GSTAR) system that will be integrated into the F-35 as part of as Block 4 upgrades.
The firm say that the GSTAR system will replace the current Antenna Electronics Unit (AEU) and will provide enhanced capabilities including the next-generation, anti-jam solution and provide a significant weight and cost reduction to the aircraft.
“We are proud to be the supplier of choice for the F-35 upgrade program and look forward to providing the GSTAR system for years to come,” said Hamid Salim, vice president, Advanced Product Solutions at Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems.
“This award is a testament to our Lockheed Martin-wide focus on innovation and advanced technology for the F-35 and our warfighters.”
According to the firm:
“The GSTAR is a fully digital system that provides the greatest protection against adversarial jamming and spoofing by utilizing critical GPS capabilities that can quickly adapt to meet specific platform requirements. The GSTAR system includes a dynamic range Radio Frequency (RF) front-end, digital beamformer and receiver that has been tested and proven against a variety of threat scenarios.”
“The GSTAR system includes a dynamic range Radio Frequency (RF) front-end, digital beamformer and receiver” You don’t say?
BV
The system its replacing was supposed to be designed to cope with GPS jamming. Clearly after the experience the US has had operating in Iraq nad Syria just recently shows perhaps the system wasn’t working as expected, hence the need for an upgrade. There has been press reports from Ukraine saying the communications and GPS jamming coming from the Russians has declined. Whilst in Syria its been reported that GPS and communications jamming has got worse. The colonel from the intelligence branch did say he suspected the decline is due to Russia sending its equipment to Syria.
The current system is quite clever as it consists of a number of GPS aerials fitted in a ring. The system then looks at the signal with the right coding and should filter out all the noise. However, as the GPS frequencies are fixed and well known, these can be easily targeted with white noise or signals similar to the original to confuse the system.
Much like cyber warfare, electronic warfare is constantly evolving and being played out in Ukraine and Syria.
That make much more sense now thankyou.
I have often though about GPS jamming, the signal from the satellites are so incredibly weak I’m surprised that jamming with good old white noise is not more common than it is. Although we shouldn’t be, we are too reliant on GPS, not just for weapon guidance but for NAV and radio timings, I think the UK needs to invest more into not only counter jamming but offensive GPS/GLONAS jamming.
BV
If you can remember there was a James Bond Film called “Tomorrow Never Dies” which was all about spoofing GPS. However, compared to the method they used, today, you can just copy the coding signal and re-transmit it at a higher power. By doing some signal conditioning you can achieve the same results as portrayed in the film by offsetting your true coordinates.
Basically as you are transmitting a much higher powered signal that mimics the true weak GPS signal. Your spoof signal will over-ride it. This is what the Russians were doing in Ukraine and Syria to brilliant effect. It was first noticed how good their spoofing was by Finland, when they conducted a military exercise. During the exercise GPS guided munitions were significant missing their targets, which was tracked down to a spoofing signal being transmitted from across the border.
Sneaky
This has always been a cat and mouse game. One side develops something and the other side counters it.