The US National PNT Advisory Board and the RNT Foundation have long called for use of “Toughened” receivers as part of a holistic “Protect, Toughen, and Augment” approach to safeguarding GPS/GNSS signals and users.

But what does “Toughen” really mean?  We at RNTF suggest that it includes a receiver being able to resist jamming, spoofing, adjacent band interference, and other disruptions, and accessing more than one signal source. While that’s a start on describing “toughened,” it’s not exactly procurement language. It doesn’t provide a lot of help for users who want to go out and select a toughened receiver and buy today.

The question of receiver performance and standards has gotten more attention within the GNSS community of late.

Earlier this month Spirent’s blog discussed this in the post As new GNSS receiver standards emerge, developers face new test challenges (Full disclosure, Spirent is a corporate supporter of the RNT Foundation). It mentions Europe’s Radio Equipment Directive (RED) which seeks to set performance criteria around mitigating adjacent band interference.

While this is a worthy goal, some see the way the European Commission has gone about it as deeply flawed. See, for example, this presentation by the GPS Innovation Alliance at the last PNT Advisory Board meeting.

We take the alliance’s concerns very seriously.

At the same time, European and other governments have real interests and concerns that also need to be taken seriously. How can they ensure that GNSS receivers used in critical infrastructure and applications are as resilient as they should be? And how can consumers be informed about what they should be buying? These are valid public safety concerns.

That’s why we support SAE Project SAE1013 “Guidelines for Resilient GNSS Receivers” and its companion effort SAE 1014 “Standard for Interfacing Resilient PNT Receivers.”

SAE is the world’s oldest, largest, and most successful engineering standards organization. And while the PNT committee is their newest, it has been one of their most productive publishing five standards in just about a year. Mr. Bill Woodward, who heads the committee discussed their efforts recently in a presentation to the PNT Advisory Board.

One of SAE’s great strengths is that it brings in expertise from across industries and incorporates the views of a wide variety of stakeholders in a collaborative, non-governmental setting. Anyone interested is invited to join and participate. All standards development is done by volunteers.

So the standards are written by those who show up. If you care and don’t show up, you are missing out.

If you want to make a difference, more information on SAE’s PNT Committee is available from:

Bill Woodward, PNT Committee Chair
[email protected]
+1-757-647-3815
or
Dorothy Lloyd
Aerospace Standards Specialist
[email protected]
+1-724-772-8663
www.sae.org