ESA fights interference in Arctic tests

News from the European Space Agency

In its pursuit of strengthening European resilience in navigation, the European Space Agency (ESA) took part in Jammertest. Jammertest 2025 brought together 360 participants from 120 organisations across more than 20 countries, spanning academia, industry and governmental institutions.

Incidents of deliberate GNSS interference are on the rise, wih attacks happening daily worldwide. Disruptions threaten safe operations of energy grids, banking infrastructure, emergency transportation and civil aviation, with an outage potentially costing billions of euros daily for Europe.

Jammertest. In a complex coordination exercise among seven Norwegian public authorities and facilitator Testnor, Jammertest organisers broadcast real satellite navigation interference for participants to observe how their equipment (on vehicles, drones, aircrafts, helicopters and vessels responds.

At nearly 70 degrees North and 300 km inside the Arctic Circle, the small village of Bleik on the island of Andøya offers the ideal setting for Jammertest. To the east, towering mountains act as natural barriers that contain disruptive signals, minimising their impact on civil society. To the west, its open coastline allows signals to be transmitted over the sea, supporting maritime participants in addition to air and land users.

The event’s test catalogue is extensive. Organisers simulate everything from simple handheld jamming to complex multi-source attacks launched from several locations simultaneously, including from mountaintops. “The goal is that every receiver is knocked out at some point during the campaign,” explains Tomas Levin, senior principal engineer at Norwegian Public Roads Administration and head of Jammertest.

“At Jammertest, the full GNSS chain sits along a table, from chip manufacturers to those developing the algorithms that run on them, to the companies building products around those chips and the ones integrating these products into larger systems,” Levin said.

ESA engineers arrived with several missions. As in previous years, the team tested the robustness of EGNOS and Galileo signals when picked by a range of antennas, from simple mass-market ones found in smartphones to military-grade antennas, both stationary and mounted on a moving van.

A key objective was to test the performance of novel receiver technologies developed under various ESA programs, comparing them to current technologies. The team also tested equipment provided by industrial partners under ESA’s Third-Party services.

More than 100 TB of data were recorded and will support internal research. Moreover, these data can now be replayed at the ESA Navigation Laboratory, allowing industry to analyse how new equipment responds to real-world interference scenarios. (If you are interested in using ESA’s NavLab testing and consultancy services, fill out the contact form on the Consultancy and Testing page).

Finally, ESA also oversaw tests of new EGNOS ground receivers being developed by European industry under Horizon2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. These receivers aim to improve the system’s robustness in its next generation.

Several projects tested at Jammertest by other participants were funded through NAVISP, highlighting the agency’s role in fostering innovation across the GNSS ecosystem. 

“Jammertest is a unique opportunity,” concludes Derambure. “Here we have the edge of technology, the edge of testing scenarios. There is nowhere else where we can test this material in real conditions. I believe Jammertest will become a mandatory step for any new satellite navigation receiver technology.”