GPS World

Tag: GAARDIAN

  • Chronos Technology receives RIN Duke of Edinburgh’s Navigation Award

    Chronos Technology receives RIN Duke of Edinburgh’s Navigation Award

    Charles Curry, founder of Chronos Technology, with the RIN award. (Photo: Chronos)
    Charles Curry, founder of Chronos Technology, with the RIN award. (Photo: Chronos)

    Chronos Technology has been recognized by the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) with its 2018 Duke of Edinburgh’s Navigation Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement in “recognition of technical excellence and authority in satellite navigation and timing vulnerabilities and mitigations.”

    Charles Curry, founder and managing director of Chronos Technology, accepted the award at the RIN Annual General Meeting held June 10 in London.

    Chronos has worked with the RIN and others since 2008 to raise awareness of GNSS vulnerabilities, and in collaboration with the University of Bath has developed a family of GNSS interference detection products.

    Chronos first started researching this phenomenon with the University of Bath in the Innovate U.K. project GAARDIAN in 2008, closely followed by the SENTINEL and AJR projects. The projects have focused on detecting and locating commercial off-the-shelf jammers mostly sourced from Chinese websites.

    The first success was seizing the so called “Girvan Jammer” in 2011, when a jammer was recovered from a commercial van driver through collaboration with the serious and organized crime group of the local police.

    This exercise took about two weeks from initial detection to recovery of the jammer and should be compared to the six months it took U.S. enforcement agencies to identify the so called “Newark Jammer.”

    SENTINEL sensors were originally rolled out in 2010 continue to provide real evidence of jamming at various locations around the U.K. The project assists police work by collating jamming events by day and time of day using a cloud-based portal.

    The GPS interference detection portfolio includes low-cost, handheld GNSS interference detectors with features such as data logging and direction finding capabilities to precisely pinpoint a jammer.

    The latest product to emerge is known as “JammerCam,” and is the first GPS jamming detector in the world to be able to take photographs of a moving vehicle, which is carrying a GPS jammer. This is now in trials with various local police forces and is photographing vehicles with jammers on a daily basis, providing real-time actionable intelligence to the law enforcement officers’ smartphones identifying vehicle type, color and number plate.

    Early trials with this research are leading to the seizing of at least one jammer per week by U.K. law enforcement agencies.

    Chronos has demonstrated the ability to work with universities and potential users to develop new, affordable products to meet a genuine need. Customers include U.K. and international law enforcement agencies and military users.

    “This is a very prestigious award, as a look at the previous winners will attest,” said John Pottle, director of the Royal Institute of Navigation. “Chronos is very well respected and has continued to innovate, achieving global influence from their U.K. base. Many congratulations to all at Chronos for this well-deserved recognition.”

    Curry was awarded Fellowship of the Royal Institute of Navigation in 2016 in recognition of his significant and continuing contribution to the practical aspects of time measurement and dissemination, including research into GNSS vulnerabilities and the use of eLoran for precise time.

    “Chronos is honored to be the recipient of the RIN’s 2018 Duke of Edinburgh’s Navigation Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement,” Curry said. “We could not have done this without our close association with the University of Bath, in particular Dr. Robert Watson and Professor Cathryn Mitchell and their colleagues in the Electrical & Electronic Faculty.

    Over the years, this association has enabled Chronos to undertake research and bring to the market GPS jamming detection products which have been thoroughly field tested at locations such as Sennybridge in the Brecon Beacons, and other international jamming trials in Norway and the U.S.

    “In particular, Chronos was the only British company to be invited to JamX17 in Idaho Falls, U.S., by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to showcase the detectors’ technology,” Curry said.

  • PNT Roundup: Taviga collaboration, leap second reconsidered and drone rules

    eLoran

    New joint venture to ensure, assure secure PNT

    The founders of Chronos and UrsaNav have formed a new collaboration, named Taviga, that will focus on preserving and establishing low-frequency (LF) positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) networks in the United Kingdom, Europe and the U.S., using repurposed Loran-C or purpose-built eLoran technology.

    Taviga aims to ensure timing and navigation for critical infrastructure, protecting it from cyber and other threats, and addressing the concern that over-dependence on single systems for PNT increases vulnerability.

    According to a joint press release, “Taviga combines the founders’ decades of experience specializing in low-frequency (LF) PNT technology and industrial timing applications at national and international levels. Its objective is to provide a commercially operated assured LF PNT service.”

    Partner with Government. Charles Curry of Chronos Technology Ltd. in the UK and Charles Schue of UrsaNav Inc. in the U.S. joined forces to launch Taviga Ltd. and Taviga LLC. Taviga anticipates working in partnership with government agencies and other entities that have a vested interest in reducing the vulnerability and improving the resilience of critical national infrastructure with a dependency on the GPS and other GNSS sources of PNT.

    “We have been researching the precise timing capability of eLoran transmissions for over 10 years,” Curry said. “During that time, the system has never failed, and most impressively it has continued to deliver sub-microsecond time accuracy traceable to UTC in very challenging locations, including deep inside buildings.

    “Our research program was supported by the UK’s Innovation Agency — Innovate UK through two flagship projects, GAARDIAN and SENTINEL,” Curry continued. “These two projects highlighted the vulnerabilities that threaten GPS signals (and in the future, Galileo) such as jamming, interference and spoofing. They also demonstrated how eLoran is a technically dissimilar source of PNT and not vulnerable to the same types of interference. eLoran is a truly complementary source of PNT, ideal for use in critical infrastructure applications such as telecoms, broadcasting, financial services and power utilities.

    “Every government, academic and industrial study has resulted in the selection of the LF technology known as Enhanced Loran, or eLoran, as the best wide-area complement to GNSS,” UrsaNav’s Schue added. “There is no doubt that the combination of GNSS and eLoran provides the PNT resilience that most users require.

    “Integrated GNSS-eLoran solutions can provide the proof-of-time and proof-of-position necessary to safeguard national infrastructure and for business continuity of operations,” Schue said. “Adding eLoran to the PNT mix enables or enhances capabilities of regional and purpose-built solutions. Overreliance on a single solution is neither prudent nor safe.”

    Tests led by Chronos and using UrsaNav’s eLoran receiver engine have consistently demonstrated positioning accuracies of better than 10 m and timing accuracies of less than 100 nanoseconds in the area of differential eLoran reference sites.

    Taviga’s goal is the long-term operation of an eLoran system for at least 10 years, a period that provides the necessary service assurance continuity to enable industrial users to invest with confidence in an eLoran-based timing and navigation service that complements their GNSS solutions. As users become accustomed to the capabilities and resilience of a combined GNSS-eLoran solution, Taviga expects to expand the service footprint worldwide.

    Timing

    Leap second lives on

    The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-15) decided that further studies are required on the impact and application of a future reference time-scale, including the modification of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and suppressing the so-called “leap second.”

    Leap seconds are added periodically to adjust to irregularities in the Earth’s rotation in relation to UTC, the current reference for measuring time, in order to remain close to mean solar time (UT1). A leap second was added most recently on June 30 at 23:59:60 UTC. The proposal to suppress the leap second would have made continuous reference timescale available for all modern electronic navigation and computerized systems to operate while eliminating the need for specialized ad hoc time systems.

    A report will be considered by the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023. Until then, UTC shall continue to be applied as described in Recommendation ITU‑R TF.460‑6.

    Disconnect from the Sun? As a representative of the Lick Observatory of the University of California stated, “a problem is that simply omitting leap seconds would redefine the meaning of the word “day” so that it is not related to the sun in the sky, nor connected with the rotation of the Earth.”

    “Modern society is increasingly dependent on accurate timekeeping,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao.“ITU is responsible for disseminating time signals by both wired communications and by different radiocommunication services, both space and terrestrial, which are critical for all areas of human activity.”

    Further studies will be coordinated by ITU along with several other international organizations.

    Inertial/GNSS

    Drone rules, registry

    The Federal Aviation Administration announced in December an official rule and registration process for hobbyists who own small unmanned aircraft weighing more than 0.55 pounds and less than 55 pounds, including payloads such as on-board cameras.

    The online registration system does not yet support registration of small UAS used for any purpose other than hobby or recreation — for example, using an unmanned aircraft in connection with a business. The FAA is developing enhancements that will allow such online registrations by spring of 2016.

    The registration procedure is a statutory requirement that applies to all hobby aircraft. Under this rule, any owner of a small UAS who has previously operated an unmanned aircraft exclusively as a model aircraft prior to Dec. 21, 2015, must register no later than Feb. 19, 2016. Owners of any other UAS purchased for use as a model aircraft after Dec. 21, 2015, must register before the first flight outdoors.

    Owners may register through a web-based system or paper-based process. There is a $5 registration fee, but the FAA is offering a full rebate for those who register before Jan. 20, 2016.

    Under the rule, each aircraft must be marked with a unique number, although not necessarily the serial number. The goal is to help authorities track down an owner if a drone collides with another aircraft, flies too high or encroaches on an airport.

    Owners using the model aircraft for hobby or recreation will only have to register once and may use the same identification number for all of their model UAS. The registration is valid for three years.

    “We expect hundreds of thousands of model unmanned aircraft will be purchased this holiday season,” FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said. “Registration gives us the opportunity to educate these new airspace users before they fly so they know the airspace rules and understand they are accountable to the public for flying responsibly.”

  • ITT Exelis, Chronos Team on Offerings for Interference, Detection and Mitigation

    ITT Exelis and Chronos Technology Ltd. have agreed to jointly pursue and develop product offerings for the GNSS interference, detection and mitigation (IDM) market.

    Satellite-based positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems are vulnerable to many factors, such as signals jamming, resulting in potentially devastating system failures. The collaboration between ITT Exelis and Chronos Technology will allow both companies to respond to the IDM market by offering a set of complementary products and solutions.

    “The IDM threat is real and the risks are increasing,” said Charles Curry, founder and managing director, Chronos Technology Ltd. “ITT Exelis has recognized the technological innovation driven by the GAARDIAN research project into GPS jamming and interference detection, and will bring cutting-edge innovations to enhance the GAARDIAN platform.”

    GAARDIAN has largely concluded its three-year run to deliver prototype sensors and probes to detect interference and give alarms, as well as detailed analyses of the GNSS environment.
    The British, European, U.S., and global economies are vulnerable, by their dependence on GPS/GNSS, to interruption of the energy supply, breakdown of communications, transport, and financial services, and potential loss of life  — all with no operational monitoring, detection, recourse, or back-up, prior to GAARDIAN and SENTINEL.

    The follow-on SENTINEL is mid-way through its two-year life to take the next requisite steps:

    • Actually locating the interference;
    • categorizing it;
    • determining its extent;
    • giving a determination of trust in GNSS,
    • and addressing spoofing.

    The project has a large user base in law enforcement and government.

    For more than 37 years, ITT Exelis payloads and payload components have been on board every GPS satellite and have accumulated in excess of 500 years of on-orbit life without a single mission-related failure due to ITT Exelis equipment.

    ITT Exelis Geospatial Systems, headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., is a global supplier of innovative night vision, remote sensing and navigation solutions that provide sight and situational awareness at the space, airborne, ground and soldier levels. Key applications include image intensification and thermal imaging; advanced power supplies; multi-spectral image systems; weather and climate monitoring; space science; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; GPS-based positioning, navigation and timing systems; and image exploitation software.

    Chronos Technology Limited is a world leader in timing synchronization solutions and GNSS jamming and interference detection, and is currently the lead for the UK Government sponsored SENTINEL research program, which followed on from the GAARDIAN GNSS interference detection project to research the location of GNSS jammers. Established in 1986, Chronos is a leading provider of technical solutions including time and timing for wireline and wireless telecom operators; highly versatile telecoms sync testing and monitoring systems and quality of service applications. Chronos also supplies GNSS (GPS) products from receivers for all application types including covert tracking, avionics and embedded systems, to test equipment (simulators) and GNSS infrastructure (antennas, splitters, repeaters) for the distribution of GNSS RF signals into sensitive environments. Chronos has developed a range of bespoke GPS timing products for time and frequency synchronization in power and communication systems.

     

  • Chronos Introduces GAARDIAN Project at ION GNSS 2009

    Chronos Technology is introducing the academic and business research consortium working on the GAARDIAN Project at its booth (#728) at the ION GNSS conference taking place this week in Savannah, Georgia. Chronos is leading the consortium, which over the course of 2009 – 2011 will be researching the data-gathering necessary to develop a system for mission and safety critical applications that will certify the accuracy, reliability, integrity, and continuity of Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) systems: GPS, the new enhanced LORAN (eLORAN), GALILEO and GLONASS.

    GAARDIAN is the acronym for “GNSS Availability, Accuracy, Reliability anD Integrity Assessment for Timing and Navigation” and the Consortium includes University of Bath, General Lighthouse Authorities, BT, Ordnance Survey, National Physical Laboratory, and Imperial College London.

    The project will create a mesh of remote PNT (Positioning, Navigation & Timing) interference detection & mitigation sensors (IDMs) which will be deployed in the vicinity of PNT dependent infrastructure & applications. These probes will monitor the integrity, reliability, continuity and accuracy of the locally received GPS (or other GNSS) and eLoran signals on a 24×7 basis and report back to a central server. The user will be alerted in real time to any anomalous behavior in either of the two PNT signals.

    IDM sensors, which can be configured by the user to be personalized to a specific deployed location, permanently monitor the PNT signals and on detection of an anomaly warn of a potentially critical situation.

    Users access the data over the internet from a secure server environment, enabling continuous monitoring from any internet enabled terminal – effectively providing access to detailed knowledge about local PNT health and pinpointing interference phenomena from anywhere in the world.

    Likely phenomena or threats to PNT services which would cause an alarm include jamming, general interference, multipath from local reflections, space environment or weather related events and satellite or transmitter malfunction.

    Traditionally it has been very difficult to analyze the specific nature of interference to a PNT signal, when monitoring one signal alone, e.g. GPS. By using the technically dissimilar eLoran signal and continually analyzing key data, the integrity, reliability, continuity and accuracy of either signal can be recorded with high confidence.

    Likely applications will include homeland security, transport users such as harbors, airports, roads and railways, emergency services, military, utilities, scientific community, telecom infrastructure and any safety or mission critical application leveraging PNT signals.

  • GAARDIAN Consortium Wins GPS/eLoran Integrity Research Project

    A business and academic consortium led by Chronos Technology has received a major grant from the U.K. government sponsored Technology Strategy Board for a £2.2 million (approximately $3.3 million) research project to improve the safety and security of location-based applications such as marine navigation and road transportation.

    The consortium has dubbed the project GAARDIAN, or GNSS Availability, Accuracy, Reliability and Integrity Assessment for Timing and Navigation. Over the next 30 months, the consortium will be developing a system for mission and safety critical applications that will certify the accuracy, reliability, and integrity of positioning, navigation and timing systems, namely GPS, enhanced Loran (eLoran), and GLONASS.

    “GPS is fast becoming an unseen, embedded and low cost commodity. The challenge to the user community is that it may not appreciate the fact that subtle failures of the GPS signal could have disastrous or expensive consequences in mission or safety critical applications,” said Charles Curry, managing director of Chronos Technology. “The impact on GPS from threats such as jamming, spoofing, space-weather, multipath and other types of interference is likely to increase over the coming years due for example to easier availability of jamming technology or more esoteric phenomena such as increased sun-spot activity. The GAARDIAN project aims to create a data gathering system that will enable any user to monitor the health of the GPS signal in the vicinity of use on a 24-7 basis in real time.”

    GAARDIAN will use the Universal Time Coordinate-traceable timing signal from the GLAs’ eLoran station at Anthorn in Cumbria, United Kingdom, along with analysis of the GPS signal data to authenticate GPS reception wherever it is needed for mission and safety critical applications. The challenge is to gather and filter large volumes of GPS and eLoran data continuously in multiple, complex and disparate environments without losing content, according to Chronos.

    “This is an exciting project that will exploit the complementary benefits of satellite and terrestrial systems to reduce risk and so improve safety and security at sea and protection of the marine environment,” said Sally Basker, director of research and radionavigation for the General Lighthouse Authorities.

    The consortium brings together seven private, public, and academic organizations: Chronos Technology, BT Design, the General Lighthouse Authorities of the United Kingdom and Ireland, the Imperial College London, the (U.K.) National Physical Laboratory, the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, and the University of Bath