The U.S. military selected Orolia Defense and Security to supply multiple BroadSim advanced GPS simulator systems, a contract valued at $1.7 million (USD), in an effort to upgrade testing facilities and field test assets.
The BroadSim Advanced GNSS Simulator (Photo: Orolia)
These new simulator systems will enable better testing of widely deployed military GPS receivers, which are integrated into air and ground-based positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems.
BroadSim will be leveraged with Orolia’s Panacea test suite, which the U.S. military uses to conduct automated testing and analysis for PNT system performance and vulnerabilities.
BroadSim will bring versatility to the testing process by supporting diverse test methods and environments such as a laboratory setting, or an over-the-air (OTA) field test event.
BroadSim was selected based on its flexibility to support the ever-changing military tasks at hand, according to Orolia. It can be easily configured to support laboratory testing one day, and field testing the next with its four independent RF outputs, removable drives, and software-defined architecture.
“Equipping our actively deployed warfighters with state-of-the-art technology is of utmost importance and can mean the difference between mission success and failure. To help achieve that goal, Orolia’s GPS testing and simulation solutions ensure that these systems are battlefield ready,” said Tyler Hohman, Orolia Defense and Security’s director of products.
The U.S. military and other federal agencies such as DHS host several test events per year in which industry participates, such as GPS Testing for Critical Infrastructure (GET-CI).
Orolia will host a webinar on this topic on Thursday, July 16, at 2 p.m. EDT, titled “PNT Vulnerability Testing for Critical Infrastructure:Lessons Learned from Defense.”
The federal government considers PNT to be a critical aspect of mission success, as outlined in the C4ISRNET white paper “Protecting the U.S. Military PNT Advantage from GPS Jamming and Spoofing” and defined in the PNT Executive Order. For the 2021 federal fiscal year, the U.S. Army alone budgeted more than $275 million towards Assured PNT Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E), as published in the 2021 Defense Budget.