GPS is vulnerable to jamming—here’s how we might fix it

Summary

Starting over And companies are coming to cash in on that desire, offering their solutions to both government agencies and other industries. “Our founding hypothesis was ‘let’s take 50 years of lessons learned but throw out the rulebook and do a clean-sheet design of a new GPS system incorporating a couple of fundamentals,’” said Patrick Shannon, CEO of one such company, called TrustPoint. The company, which has hired scientific and engineering experts in signal processing and space, aims to have a fleet of small satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than the current GPS constellation, and transmitting at a higher frequency. TrustPoint’s satellites, a few of which have already gone to orbit, also send out an encrypted signal—something harder to spoof. With traditional GPS, only the military gets encrypted signals. Many Russian jamming systems, he said, work tens of kilometers from their ground zero (their ground zero usually being a truck with a generator aboard). But with TrustPoint’s higher-frequency signals, the effectiveness of the jammer goes down by three times, and the circle of influence becomes 10 times smaller, shrinking even more if the receivers use a special kind of antenna that the U.S. government recently approved. Messing with signals becomes less feasible, given those changes. “They would need exorbitant numbers of systems, exorbitant numbers of people, and a ton of cash to pull that off,” said Shannon. So far, TrustPoint has launched three spacecraft, and has gotten five federal contracts in 2024 and 2025, totaling around $8.3 million, with organizations like the Air Force, Space Force, and the Navy. Another company, called Xona Space Systems, is also putting satellites in low-Earth orbit, and has worked with both the Canadian and U.S. governments. The company plans to broadcast signals 100 times stronger than GPS, giving users two-centimeter precision, and making jamming more difficult. The signal also includes a watermark—a kind of authenticat...