GPS technology developer, oneNav, has announced the results of a real-world test which, it says, proves the resilience of its technology to widespread GPS interference.

The tests, which took place in and around Haifa, Israel, examined the performance of the GPS receivers in leading smartphone and smartwatch brands.

The company claims this is the first such commercial test ever to be conducted in an active conflict zone.

oneNav compared its L5-direct GPS receiver to receivers found in iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel smartphones and Garmin watches.

The company says that while the other receivers all experienced navigation failure due to GPS interference, oneNav’s L5-direct’s maintained accurate location fixes despite active jamming and spoofing.

oneNav says the resilience is due to L5-direct being able to directly acquire the L5 signal and bypass the L1 GPS. It says that while current commercial GPS receivers in smartphones, car navigation systems and aircraft are able to process the L5 band, they can only do so in a hybrid system that must first acquire L1 signals, which are being jammed in Israel and elsewhere.

The company says L5-band signals are 30x harder to jam and interfere with compared to L1, and offer superior performance in difficult-to-navigate areas such as urban canyons and tree-covered regions.

“As our adversaries’ GPS jamming capabilities become more sophisticated, the need to modernise this crucial technology could not be clearer,” said oneNav Advisory Board Member Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (Ret.), also a Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Make no mistake, GPS interference can happen in any war zone and even our domestic critical infrastructures are at risk,” he added. “The United States has the technology to combat these threats, we just need to implement it.”