Abstract
ABSTRACT For reasons of both economic motivation and military conflicts, the intentional interference with critical global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals has evolved from nearly unheard of to a daily occurrence over the previous 20 years. As the interference threat is gradually evolving in coherence with the development of new mitigation strategies, it is important to monitor its evolution and keep the GNSS receiver testing capabilities in alignment. This article presents the motivations and outcomes of a 6 year process to first measure, characterise and understand the ecosystem of harmful radio frequency interference (RFI) signals, to development of a comprehensive evaluation framework incorporating software defined radio (SDR) based flexible signal generation. The developed simulation framework allows controlled production of both observed and theorised signal families over the entirety of their measured parameters spaces, and the efficient collection of observation data produced by an array of GNSS receivers to determine if given RFI modulations were stimulating enhanced failure modes in the devices under test. The test results discussed in this paper clearly show that consideration of the parameter space over which the RFI signal types occur must be taken into account when determining expected RFI impacts on GNSS receivers.