Glossary

Anti-jamming

Short answer

Techniques and equipment that maintain GNSS reception in the presence of deliberate or accidental RF interference. The main hardware approach is a CRPA (controlled reception pattern antenna); software approaches include narrow-band filtering, AGC compression detection, and pulse blanking.

Detailed explanation

GNSS signals at the user antenna are extraordinarily weak — about −128 dBm at GPS L1, well below thermal noise. A trivially-small jammer (sub-watt at 1 km range) can overwhelm this signal and prevent any GNSS receiver from acquiring or tracking. Anti-jamming is the collection of hardware and software techniques that maintain useable reception despite such interference.

Hardware anti-jamming: CRPA arrays (steer nulls toward jammers), high dynamic range LNAs (don't compress under strong in-band signals), saturation-resistant front-ends, narrow-band notch filters (remove specific known interferers like FM repeaters), and pulse blanking (drop sample windows that contain pulse jammers).

Software anti-jamming: AGC monitoring (detect interference by watching for unusual compression), narrow-band excision in the frequency domain, multi-constellation cross-validation, and Kalman filter weighting based on per-satellite C/N₀.

Operational anti-jamming: physical antenna placement (avoid line-of-sight to ground-level jammers, use roof masking), inertial coast-through during jamming events, and switching to alternate PNT sources (eLoran, INS) when GNSS is denied. The DSP-based CRPA is the highest-payoff hardware investment for high-value platforms.

Where you'll see this

Anti-Jamming CRPA

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