Mayflower Demonstrates its GPS Anti-Jam Product on Army Black Hawk Helicopter

Burlington, MA, June 28, 2002 – Mayflower Communications Company, Inc. (Mayflower) today announced the successful flight testing of its GPS anti-jam product by the U.S. Army on the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. These flight tests were conducted by the Air Force 746th Test Squadron, 46th Test Group at Holloman AFB, NM. The Mayflower GPS anti-jam product tested by the Army is based on Mayflower’s GPS anti-jam antenna technology developed for the U.S. Army CECOM, under the Army SBIR Small Affordable Anti-Jam GPS Antenna (SAAGA) Program.

The SAAGA anti-jam technology incorporates a 4-element antenna array and controls the antenna array pattern to direct nulls towards the jammers while maximizing the desired signal-to-noise power ratio. The SAAGA product has been tested with different configurations of both active and passive antenna arrays and with multiple military GPS receivers. The antenna arrays used in these flight tests were developed by Sensor Systems, Inc. of Chatsworth, CA for Mayflower under the SAAGA program.

The SAAGA product flight tested by the U.S. Army replaces the old analog RF antenna control (employed in the first generation anti-jam equipment) with digital antenna control technology. This technology permits cost and size reduction while enhancing the performance features of the GPS anti-jam equipment. The SAAGA product is packaged in an AE-4 foot-print with a height of approximately 5 inches. It is designed to operate with a 4-element GPS L1/L2 antenna array, therefore it provides the desired anti-jam capability at L1 and L2 frequencies, under the control of the GPS receiver. The SAAGA unit is controlled via RS-232/422 through a connector (power connector) and is powered externally. The current design uses a nominal 28 V power supply for vehicle operation. The SAAGA unit manages its power consumption, and can be easily configured to operate as an adaptive temporal filter (ATF) – minimum power consumption mode, an adaptive spatial filter (ASF), or as an adaptive spatial-temporal filter (ASTF) to mitigate effectively the GPS jamming threat. The recent SAAGA flight tests utilized the Honeywell EGI (embedded GPS inertial) receiver. These Army flight tests at Holloman AFB demonstrated the anti-jam capability of the SAAGA technology. The flight tests identified that the Mayflower SAAGA ant-jam technology, after some ruggedization and additional environmental testing, can be productized and will offer an alternative and affordable anti-jam solution to the Army Platforms.

Mayflower Communications is a privately held research and development company with its offices in Burlington, MA. Mayflower has been at the forefront of developing affordable GPS anti-jam technology solutions for over 10 years to protect GPS receivers from unintentional as well as intentional radio frequency interference (RFI), i.e. intentional jamming. Both commercial and military GPS receivers are known to be vulnerable to RFI. Even though the military GPS receivers are designed to be more tolerant to jamming, the jamming is a critical concern in military receivers because of the DoD reliance on GPS availability in a theatre which can potentially be denied by an adversary by fielding intentional jammers. Mayflower’s R&D work in this technology area has been funded by Mayflower and by the U.S. Air Force, Army, GPS JPO, DARPA and the Navy.