Dual-Satellite Geolocation of Terrestrial GNSS Jammers from Low Earth Orbit

GNSS Radio Frequency Interference Monitoring from LEO Satellites: An In-Laboratory Prototype

“…Under the boost of the US Department of Defense pilot program launched in 2022, many other companies, e.g., Spire Global, Inc.-San Francisco (CA), U.S. and Kleos Space S.A.-Luxembourg (LU), EU, started building their own businesses on satellite-based RFI geolocation [ 36 ]. On the academic side, GNSS RFI detection, classification, and localization from LEO have been demonstrated to provide promising results [ 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ], i.e., authors successfully geolocated some real-world jamming and spoofing signals using data from the FOTON receiver mounted aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in [ 38 , 39 ] and two STRATOS satellites provided by Spire Global Inc. in [ 40 ]. Anyway, both the FOTON receiver and the STRATOS satellites were originally designed for GNSS radio occultation purposes.…”

“…On the other hand, the narrow RF band is incompatible with modern wideband signals, such as the Galileo E5 a/b OS signals, which require a minimum bandwidth (double-sided) of at least 20 MHz [ 41 ]. Additionally, it is known that in order to implement advanced detection (and mitigation) techniques, a higher number of quantization bits is recommended [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ]. High-bit-count analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) (at least 4 quantization bits) allow for a higher fidelity of the recorded signal; consequently, improved performance on classification and localization is also expected [ 43 , 44 , 45 ].…”