When GPS Lies: GNSS Anti-Jamming Technology for Honest Drone Navigation

A drone flies straight, follows its course, completes its mission — until it doesn't.

Somewhere over the Baltic region, a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone suddenly veers off its programmed route. No warning lights flash on the operator's screen. No error messages appear. The autopilot shows everything is normal. But the drone is no longer where it thinks it is. It's heading toward Latvia, toward an oil facility it was never meant to approach.

Two days later, another drone crashes in nearly the same spot. Latvian military experts later suggest that Russian electronic warfare systems may have been using signal spoofing combined with AI-related technologies to redirect the drones — feeding them false coordinates so gradually that the autopilot never triggered a correction.

The drone never lost its GNSS signal. It received a signal — just the wrong one.

The problem starts with physics. A GNSS satellite orbiting at roughly 20,000 kilometers transmits a signal so weak that by the time it reaches the ground, it's barely detectable. Jamming simply drowns it out with noise. Spoofing goes further: it replaces the real signal with a counterfeit one, feeding the receiver false position data that the autopilot accepts as truth.

The drone doesn't know it's being deceived. Its onboard systems report normal operation, positioning data intact, navigation on course. It flies confidently in the wrong direction until something stops it — a border, a building, or the ground.

This is the fundamental asymmetry of the threat. A few hundred dollars' worth of off-the-shelf components can compromise a multi-million-dollar platform. And the drone itself won't tell you anything is wrong.

The defense industry has responded with a layered approach. Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA) technology uses multiple antenna elements to detect the direction of incoming signals and nullify those that don't match the expected satellite pattern. Septentrio recently launched a module weighing just 2.2 grams that delivers what it calls "the highest level of anti-jamming and anti-spoofing protection" for mission-critical UAV applications. Honeywell is pursuing alternative navigation methods — radar velocity, visual navigation, and LEO satellite signals — to reduce reliance on GNSS altogether. Roke has introduced an anti-jam system designed to make protected GNSS technology more accessible to a wider range of platforms.

But the core principle remains the same: a drone needs to know where it actually is, not where someone else tells it it is.

At SUNON, we approach the problem from the ground up.

But the real test isn't on the spec sheet. It's in the field — in the environments where signals are contested, where a drone's navigation is under active attack, and where the operator needs to trust that the data on the screen is real.

We build for that moment.

Because when the signal lies, the hardware has to tell the truth.