The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation The UK has just completed commercial flight trials of quantum-based navigation systems that are designed to be immune to conventional jamming and spoofing. Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) systems rely on precision timekeeping. The theory goes that by stirring quantum technology into the mix – in this case, ultracold …
A "GPS alterative" or rather a GNSS alternative [1] developed and used in the UK was eLoran (a rather good longwave system, not to be confused with the old Loran-C).
The system was built and switched on in 2014, giving positioning accuracies of < 10m over much of the UK and surrounding seas...... for a period of months until government funding was pulled. (Though, Korea kept their e-Loran system running due to their Northern friends playing silly buggers jamming GNSS). Pulling the plug on eLoran is now something the UK government is starting to regret. It will take years to get it up and running again.
And no, eLoran isn't a substitute for quantum navigation, or a direct substitute for GNSS, but it is a damn good string in our bow of resilient position, navigation and timing (PNT) in the UK. What's more, eLoran could be had for relative peanuts compared to the others.
Its another example of good work by British Boffins going to waste thanks to government.
[1] There are four Global Navigation Sattelite Systems (GNSS), namely Galileo, Glonass, GPS and Beidou. All four are as piss easy to jam as each other. On the other hand, jamming a strong longwave eLoran signal is rather more difficult to say the least.
Just one comment about the 4 GNSS systems; my phone (and most, if not all modern smart phones) will use all 4 systems simultaneously to get a location fix, so for the end user, they are one system. That isn't to say that you can't spoof or jam all of them simultaneously though....
Doesn't quite work like that here
What happens is the UK government boffin department develops the idea almost to completion, then tries to find a commecial manufacturer for it.*
Since the time it will take to generate any returns is longer than 5 minutes, the spivs in the city of london tell the governmnet 'fuck off we're not funding it' as they do to anyone asking for venture capital to fund a new manufacturing company.
Then a foriegn company goes "That looks like an idea we can make fly" and offers the government 5 million quid and gets all the IP and demo tech. 12 months later they've made eleventy billion dollars profit from it.**
*The daily mail/express headlines "another british world beater!!!" as they usually do
** and the government has changed to labour, so the daily excess/wail headlines read "LABOUR SOLD OUR STUFF FOR PEANUTS!!!!!!!"
Hadn't a clue what this was - cynically thinking marketing just put the buzzword 'quantum' in front of a gyroscope. :)
A quick search tells me that it can be an accelerometer constructed from a atom interferometer which uses the wave properties (quantum) of atoms instead of photons.
So an inertial navigation system that has very low drift and high precision. Presumably requires extremely accurate and precise time keeping and the precise interferometry.
Must still be some clever people out there. ;)
Indeed. More accurate than atomic clocks are optical clocks, which have only recently escaped the lab and into a rack mount. The first example application the developers give is 'GNSS resilience'.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231113157771/en/Vector-Atomic-brings-world%E2%80%99s-first-rackmount-optical-clock-to-market
Must still be some clever people out there. ;)
I'm curious on performance and cost here. I've worked with a gyro-based INS in the past that could achieve on the order of a few km of error over 24 hours of operation. It was - how can I put this - pretty seriously not cheap. Though the system was, admittedly, decades old by the time I worked with it.
This is the kind of thing that attracts pretty well-policed export controls (it turns out to be quite useful if you're building a cruise missile, for instance) so I'm guessing those details aren't going to be public for a while.
I believe the Ukranians have ceased using the US built small diameter glide-bombs that were bodged together to be fired from HIMARS launchers because of Russian GPS jamming. They were a stop-gap while the administration were unwilling to ship ATACAMS - but it does show that weapons already can't rely on just satellite navigation. Both sides have had problems with GPS jamming interfering with their aim.
As the article says at the end, a presumably larger version of this was trialled on a Royal Navy ship last year. The Navy would want it anyway, for their submarines, even if satellites were guaranteed to always work perfectly.
The RAF's Paveway IV has an inertial backup in case of GPS failure - and can also be laser guided. Apparently the Storm Shadow / SCALP cruise missile only uses GPS as a backup, relying on a system of waypoints with programmed visual cues for its infrared imaging camera and inertial navigation as well. I guess it pays to be paranoid.
There's also been a lot of problems with air navigation in the Baltic region - because Russia keeps jamming GPS, and its caused quite a lot of problems with civilian flights.
Unlike the Cold War, where the Soviet Union often decided to be predictable in exchange for an easy life for themselves - Putin's regime appear to be quite nihilist and would often rather fuck with other people at whatever cost to themselves just to prove that they are still important. It's a sort of global dick-measuring thing, that sadly interferes with everyone else's map-measuring. Iran also seems to be in a bit of a chaos-agent mode at the moment, so I think we're just going to have to accept that common international standards will be a target and so we're going to have to harden things like civilian navigation systems.
Doesn't Galileo support an additional "channel" for military use, offering better precision and resistance to jamming?
I believe so, as I think does GPS.
I assume that these make GPS-spoofing a lot harder. But jamming a satellite signal, which is quite weak, is relatively easy when you have enough power. So I suspect it's only a marginal improvement - in terms of avoiding jamming. Although the closer you are to the satellite, and the further you are from the jammer - particularly if you've got an antenna that can filter out signals from the wrong direction - the better you're going to do. Military GPS sets are bound to be more expensive and have more bells and whistles.
Just radiate a lot of randomised power at the same frequencies. It's illegal of course, but that wouldn't stop a government.
Pretty much the only defence against jamming GNSS is to have a fairly narrow antenna pointed straight up - or be low enough to the ground that the jammer doesn't have line of sight.
However, Putin has aircraft and satellite launch capabilities, so it seems pretty likely that they'll be jamming from above too. A jamming sat can afford a much higher power budget than something that's intended to run for decades.
Military GPS is much more difficult to spoof (convince the target of a wrong time and/or location) as you need the key, but not really any more difficult to jam, assuming equivalent antenna design.
The real signals are tiny, after all.
I was wondering about "traditional" INS too. Were you referring to mechanical gyros, or the somewhat fancier laser gyros ? I'd also be a bit worried by the "low temperature" requirement for the quantum version. Hardly trivial or light in weight.
There is a trend towards using GNSS based approaches at airports. Given the vulnerability of such systems, this strikes me as less than ideal.
I know ILS and other ground-based systems are costly to install and run, but surely they will be rather more resilient.
And don't get me going on the reliance of cellular phones, DAB radio, etc on satellite sourced precision timing ....
After some years in general aviation, I’ve witnessed incidents of pilots talking to one airfield radio whilst arriving visually at a different airfield.
So airfield A radio can’t see the aircraft that claims it is joining and airfield B sees an aircraft arrive without radio contact.
"It means you can have arrived and not arrived at the same time. Should make airport arrival boards interesting."
I'm pretty sure that is the argument Ryanair lawyers use when flight delay payment is claimed for
(There is also the many world interpretation. It is not that your plane was delayed, it just the plane in this particular universe instance was delayed, while in all the other universes, they arrived on schedule)
>You have pissed it away trying unsucessfully to buy the xenophobic vote for the Tories.
Seems an expensive way to go about it.
You could just pay a few voters in marginal constituencies directly.
Or even cheaper - just pay a few journalists at a couple of tabloids to say that you have deported millions already
Based on past experience, I'd say the government will throw millions at it. Not billions, unless the company is run by someone linked to a minister.
The company will survive for a few years, using government funding to help pay for the development. The company will then go bankrupt, and the tech will turn up at some American large corporation, when they buy it for a song.
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