GNSS Quality Assurance
What is GNSS Quality Assurance?
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) positioning and timing services form the backbone of many applications and markets. Civilian GNSS services are free of charge and globally available but insufficiently protected against unintentional and even intentional disturbances. For many applications, it’s not only precision that matters, but predominantly integrity too.
Mitigating the risk of GNSS interference
GNSS is vulnerable to many threats. The signals transmitted from GNSS satellites orbiting the earth at approximately 20.000 km altitude above the earth’s surface are very weak with the transmission power of a 100W light bulb (depending on the constellation and satellite generation). The signals are received on the earth’s surface with a signal power below the thermal noise floor. These weak signals can be disturbed or degraded by many sources:
- Out-of-band interference and unintentional interference typically caused by neighbouring frequency bands or environmental influences.
- Jamming - an intentional attempt to interrupt the GNSS service by broadcasting higher-powered signals.
- spoofing - an intentional attempt to force a GNSS receiver to report a false position/course.
GIDAS OHB Austria
GIDAS is OHB Austria's market-leading, GNSS quality assurance system, designed for safety-critical infrastructure, such as airports and ports. The air traffic controllers or port operators have a live view at the on-site health and quality of GNSS, before navigation systems are negatively affected by GNSS interference.
GIDAS - an ideal solution for:
- Civil air and maritime navigation
- Time synchronisation of critical infrastructure systems
- Military navigation
- Civil road navigation and infotainment systems
- Government systems
- Geodesy
- Road tolls and automated payments
- Automated agricultural machinery
GIDAS - at a glance
- Composed of multiple monitoring sensors, deployed at the desired monitoring area
- All data is stored at a local monitoring centre, giving users full control without the need of cloud based data centres
- Continuous and automatic 24/7 jamming and spoofing detection
- Real-time alerts (TTA <6s)
- Can be interfaced with higher-level systems such as air traffic management consoles
- Easily configurable and operatable over a web-based user interface by PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone
Available in multiple form factors to suit different environments
- GIDAS Stationary - a permanently installed GNSS quality assurance system, designed for safety-critical infrastructures, such as airports and ports.
- GIDAS Portable - a flexible quality assurance system for mobile operation.
Our team can also help with the integration of a mobile-based system specifically designed for fleet and in-vehicle use or an embedded solution for direct implementation into your end systems and platforms.
Find out more
For more information about OHB Austria's GIDAS system or to discuss other aspects of GNSS quality assurance for critical infrastructure systems, start a technical conversation with our dedicated team of experts.