L3Harris Technologies has delivered more than 100,000 next-generation military GPS receivers to U.S. and allied forces under the Modernised GPS User Equipment (MGUE) Increment 1 programme, the company stated.
The milestone reflects ongoing efforts to modernise positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) capabilities as military forces face increasing threats from jamming, spoofing and cyber interference. The receivers use Military-Code (M-Code), designed to provide secure and resilient GPS access in contested electromagnetic environments, according to the company.
L3Harris said the systems are being deployed across a range of platforms, including air, land and maritime systems, supporting more distributed and joint operations. The scale of deliveries indicates a broader transition toward modernised GPS capability across U.S. and allied forces.
Quinlan Lyte, President of Advanced Effects at L3Harris, said: “As the global threat environment continues to evolve, secure and resilient PNT has never been more critical to ensuring operational advantage. Reaching this delivery milestone reflects our team’s sustained commitment to equipping the warfighter with reliable technology designed to perform in the most contested environments.”
The company added that development is continuing under MGUE Increment 2, including work on new application-specific integrated circuits and the TruTrak-M Type II receiver, aimed at improving size, weight, power and cost efficiency while maintaining performance and security.
Since it’s now common for recreational GNSS receivers to support the four global standards Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou and GPS with simultaneous positions from all available space vehicles (multi-constellation) the innovation is less about accuracy and more about reliability.
Long ago, only M-Code could do centremeter accuracy but Wide Area Augmentation System WAAS and Real Time Kinematics RTK have made that survey grade accuracy common.
So reliability could mean evading interference like natural multipath distortion or unnatural jamming effects from RF EW equipment (Köenigsburg etc). It may seem rather obvious that receivers should be looking up to space vehicles (satellites) and not at ground based transmitters (EW) but that’s a little harder to do in practice. Where the antenna cannot be fixed, so pointing up, an active array is required to steer the antenna based on an inertial management unit that knows which way is up.
Fortunately IMU components are common in mass market smartphones and road vehicles so size, accuracy and cost are all affordable. Equally the active array is a solved problem in Defence and Aerospace so more expensive but not ridiculous.
Packaging such equipment in shells or lightweight missiles isn’t easy, which is why combat effectiveness of those weapons is lower than expected due yo EW countermeasures. Without precision their high cost isn’t sustainable.
However it’s possible for a UAV to have an active antenna that rejects interference from the ground based EW systems, or just give up on GNSS and fit fibre optic to enable First Person View FPV. When you know the terrain, you don’t need positions to hunt your targets. Partnership with ISTAR specialist UAVs is the enabler for FPV combat effectiveness.
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