NATO eyes solar-powered high altitude platforms to counter GPS jamming
NATO EDGE 2024 — NATO has been “looking at” overcoming Russian or Chinese GPS jamming by relaying satellite signals through ultra-high-flying aircraft, a NATO official told Breaking Defense.
“These are big, high-altitude planes that can stay for weeks in the air based on solar energy, and they can capture the GPS signal and send it down to earth with much more power that is more difficult to jam,” Brig. Gen. Sam Raeves, who serves as the assistant chief of staff of J6 Cyberspace at NATO, said in an interview on the sidelines of the NATO Edge conference here.
Extremely high-altitude platforms (HAPS), which can come in the form of balloons in addition to light-weight drones like the spindly Airbus-made Zephyr, are not yet in widespread use by NATO, Raeves said. But their potential for them to serve as GPS relays comes as officials have grown increasingly concerned about electronic warfare, a now-ubiquitous feature of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.