InfiniDome records GPS jamming mitigation at Israel-Syria border

InfiniDome has conducted testing and measurements in the Golan Heights along the Israel-Syria border. The goal of the tests was to hunt down jamming events, record them, see how they affect both protected and unprotected receivers, and then compare the results.

Two identical u-blox M8N receivers aboard a UAV were tested side by side, with one protected by GPSdome technology.

The GPSdome anti-jammer is a retrofit module that can be easily integrated to protect any GNSS-based system. It combines patterns from two omnidirectional antennas to create a null in the direction of the jamming signal, thus attenuating its power, making any GPS receiver about 50 times more resilient to jamming.

In a video of the tests, the GNSS receiver protected by GPSdome can be seen maintaining the GPS signal along the border, enabling uninterrupted navigation.

In contrast, the unprotected GNSS receiver loses the GPS signal during the attack, which can easily result in the drone becoming completely jammed, aggressively drifting and eventually crashing.

The Israel-Syria border experiences frequent jamming from Russian forces positioned in Syria, affecting critical border surveillance operations in the Golan Heights. Other global hotspots for jamming include the U.S.-Mexico border, where drug cartels use jammers on U.S. border surveillance drones, and the Shanghai port in China, where pirates may be the cause of ship and plane navigation confusion through use of jammers.

Jamming in Ukraine has also been well documented, with attacks from Russian forces taking down any plane, drone and even critical infrastructure asset in proximity, according to infiniDome.

The jamming attack was analyzed and appears not to have been a brute force attack, but rather a slightly more sophisticated signal, causing the receivers to “see” satellites but not be able to sync their signals and track them. The receiver protected by the GPSdome was able to distinguish between the real GNSS signals and the jamming signals.

In addition, GPSdome was able to attenuate the jamming signals sufficiently to be able to continue tracking the real GNSS signals while at the same time reporting the attack via its dedicated alert output.

Because GPSdome is both lightweight and easy to integrate (see integration diagram below), it can effectively provide much-needed resilience to drones and UAVs from widely available jammers, enabling drone operators to carry out missions safely and reliably.