The first production units of a system designed to improve the jamming resistance of global positioning system (GPS)-guided weapons will be available for incorporation in the Lockheed Martin Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) early next year, say industry officials.
GPS-guided weapons, such as JASSM and the Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), are critical assets in the US military's precision guided munition arsenal, but current low-power GPS satellite signals are vulnerable to jamming. The Navstar GPS Joint Programme Office in 1996 awarded a Lockheed Martin/Rockwell Collins team a two-year navigation warfare study contract to develop a solution to overcome the threat.
The result is the digital GPS Spatial Temporal Anti-Jam Receiver (G-STAR), applicable to civil and military GPS-related systems, which uses commercial-off-the-shelf components.
A prototype was tested in the Wright Patterson antenna wavefront simulator, which replicates a GPS jammed environment, last August. The test results are classified, but Steven Laabs, an aerospace business development manager for Lockheed Martin Federal Systems, says G-STAR "demonstrated an anti-jam performance improvement of several orders of magnitude better than current anti-jam technology."
Source: Flight International
