GPS has a structural weakness that has nothing to do with satellites failing and everything to do with physics: the signals arriving from 12,500 miles up are astonishingly faint by the time they reach a receiver, which makes them trivially easy to drown out with a cheap jammer or fool with a spoofed replica. A demonstration completed under a U.S. Navy contract has now shown that a commercially available receiver can pick up an entirely different kind of satellite signal, broadcast at a much higher frequency, and keep working through exactly the kind of interference that blinds ordinary GPS.
Key Points
- A NovAtel receiver acquired and tracked a live C-band navigation signal from a TrustPoint satellite in a real-sky test conducted in December 2025.
- The work was performed under a Navy SBIR Phase II contract managed by the Naval Air Warfare Center–Aircraft Division, giving it a formal defense procurement pedigree.
- TrustPoint and Hexagon’s NovAtel unit call it an industry first: a receiver platform already trusted across commercial and military markets operating on C-band through simulated jamming.
- The receiver was also run through a lab-based electronic warfare simulation, separate from the live-sky test, to gauge early anti-jam performance.
- The result fits a broader, years-long defense and industry push toward “layered” positioning, navigation, and timing that no longer depends on GPS alone.
What Happened, and Why the Frequency Matters
In December 2025, engineers pointed a NovAtel receiver at the sky and had it acquire and track a live signal broadcast from a TrustPoint satellite in low Earth orbit. The signal wasn’t GPS. It was transmitted in C-band, a frequency range roughly five to eight gigahertz, well above the L-band frequencies (around 1.2 to 1.6 gigahertz) that GPS and its international counterparts — Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou — have used since their inception. SpaceNews reported the receiver “acquired and tracked a live C-band signal from a TrustPoint satellite,” describing it as a live-sky test run jointly by TrustPoint and Hexagon’s NovAtel division. TrustPoint’s own account, issued the same week, stated plainly that the demonstration “confirms that TrustPoint’s C-band signals can be acquired, tracked and used to generate precise positioning data in environments where GPS is degraded or denied by modern electronic warfare”.
The frequency choice is the whole story mechanically. GPS’s L-band signals are weak by design necessity — the satellites are far away and power-limited — which is precisely what makes them so susceptible to jamming: a jammer only needs to overpower a faint signal, not defeat encryption or spoof a message. C-band signals, especially from satellites in low Earth orbit rather than GPS’s medium orbit, arrive stronger and occupy a part of the spectrum crowded with different noise sources, meaning an adversary’s L-band jammer built to blind GPS receivers does nothing to a C-band receiver listening on a different frequency entirely. That separation — different band, different orbit, different vulnerability profile — is the underlying engineering logic behind nearly every alternative-PNT effort now underway, not just TrustPoint’s.
A Navy Contract With a Specific, Narrow Ask
This wasn’t a speculative research exercise dressed up for a press release. The test was conducted under a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contract funded by Naval Air Systems Command and led by the Naval Air Warfare Center–Aircraft Division, according to both SpaceNews and TrustPoint’s Business Wire announcement. Military.com reported that the government’s public award description called for something precise: “a commercial prototype receiver and multi-element C-band antenna capable of providing time and position without GPS during L-band jamming or spoofing”. That specificity matters. It tells you the Navy wasn’t funding open-ended exploration of exotic navigation concepts; it was funding a defined engineering deliverable aimed at a battlefield problem — aircraft, ships, and munitions losing GPS lock in contested electromagnetic environments — that has grown more acute as adversary jamming and spoofing capability has proliferated.
TrustPoint arrived at this contract with a track record already in motion. The company received an earlier NAVAIR SBIR Phase II selection in April 2025 specifically for a “C-band APNT service” — APNT meaning alternative positioning, navigation and timing, the industry’s shorthand for anything that isn’t reliant on GPS. By June 2025 it had launched its third satellite and established first contact, and by May 2026 it had also secured a U.S. Space Force TACFI contract to demonstrate an end-to-end GPS-independent PNT system. The August 2026 receiver demonstration is best understood not as an isolated event but as the latest checkpoint in a multi-year, multi-service investment pattern — one Space Force official and industry publications have described as accelerating rapidly, with TrustPoint securing five Phase II SBIR awards in eighteen months by early 2026.
What the Test Actually Proved — and Its Honest Limits
Two distinct exercises fed the “industry first” claim. The first was the live-sky acquisition described above: real signal, real satellite, real receiver, in orbit-to-ground conditions. The second was a laboratory electronic warfare simulation, in which the receiver was subjected to interference to gauge anti-jam behavior. Military.com reported that TrustPoint’s Shannon described this as producing “early, baseline anti-jam performance” data, and SpaceNews specified that the lab jammer used was “a very basic wideband high power jammer” rather than an operationally representative threat replicating sophisticated adversary electronic warfare. That distinction is worth holding onto: the live-sky signal acquisition and the interference resistance test are two separate accomplishments, tested under two separate conditions, and the public record is clear that the jamming scenario represented an early, baseline benchmark rather than a battlefield-grade stress test.
Where This Fits in the Larger Shift Away from GPS Dependence
None of this is happening in isolation. Militaries and commercial operators worldwide have spent the past several years moving from a “GPS as the single indispensable layer” posture toward layered PNT architectures, stacking multiple independent signal sources — different frequencies, different orbits, inertial navigation, network timing — so that no single point of interference can blind a platform entirely. RAND has documented this shift in national resilience planning, and the Space Force has separately funded a growing ecosystem of low-Earth-orbit alternatives precisely because signals broadcast from lower altitudes are inherently harder to jam and easier to make powerful. TrustPoint’s C-band approach, alongside competitors working in other bands and orbits, represents one thread in that broader fabric — not a replacement for GPS so much as an insurance layer against its single greatest weakness.
TrustPoint tested C-band navigation on a modified NovAtel receiver, advancing a GPS-independent option for jammed environments. https://t.co/P7YQqFS0ZH
— Military.com (@Militarydotcom) August 25, 2026
What Comes Next
The near-term test of this program’s real value will be whether TrustPoint and NAVAIR move from baseline lab jamming toward range-level testing against representative electronic warfare threats, and whether the Navy’s contract deliverables translate into fielded hardware rather than another round of demonstration milestones. Given the pace of SBIR awards TrustPoint has accumulated across NAVAIR and the Space Force, the trajectory points toward continued government investment in C-band as a genuine GPS-independent layer, with the December 2025 receiver test standing as the proof-of-concept that made the case for the next phase of funding.
Sources:
military.com, spacenews.com, businesswire.com
