Out-of-Band GNSS Tracker

Applications for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) are exploding. The military uses SUAS for various applications including ISR, communications range extension, and support for manned and unmanned teams. Our adversaries are also leveraging SUAS, resulting in our military developing counter-UAS (CUAS) systems. The military desires a SUAS position, location and tracking system that supports non-standard wireless telemetry links capable of providing Time Space Position Information (TSPI) at communications ranges of 20km or greater to several ground-based terminals. SUAS location information should leverage multiple GNSS technologies to provide a robust and resilient SUAS positioning and tracking solution. The objective of this project is to design a low SWAP-C SUAS position location and tracking system that leverages Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology to enable frequency agnostic non-standard wireless telemetry links. Our flexible, modular design includes concurrent reception of multiple GNSS technologies (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo) to broadcast the position of a SUAS to multiple ground-based receivers using a robust interference tolerant spread spectrum waveform. The system includes the SUAS Tracker, Ground Terminal, Wireless Telemetry Link, and SUAS Tracker Application that runs on a host computer or tablet and provides the ability to configure the system, and display tracking results on a map.