Xona Space Systems is having a busy month. The positional satellite company, based in Burlingame, Calif., was the subject of two big announcements in early August: one announcing FCC approval for their constellation, and the other announcing a successful GNSS spoofing test in Japan.
Put together, they show that the company is in a position to have a potentially meaningful effect on terrestrial positioning and navigation, and one that could help to mitigate some potentially serious threats.
Lower orbit, stronger signals
The product at the centre of these announcements is Xona’s “Pulsar” satellites. In brief, the Pulsars are essentially navigation satellites, serving much the same purpose as existing GPS satellites: providing positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) information to terrestrial devices.
The difference is the orbit; while Global Positioning System (GPS) and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are in medium Earth orbits (MEO) of approximately 20,000 km from Earth, Xona’s Pulsars operate in low Earth orbit (LEO). The LEO orbits do mean that there will need to be far more Pulsar satellites in order to ensure global coverage, yet there are also potential advantages that make up for that.
Since the signal doesn’t have to travel as far, the signal can be far stronger; Xona says that the signal can be 100 times stronger than traditional GPS, despite operating in the same frequency range used for GPS. That stronger signal allows the Pulsar to enable much more locational precision: terrestrial devices using Pulsar can determine their position within centimeters, even in remote locations with no base stations nearby.
(Xona recently highlighted the potential use of Pulsar for “plant-level” farming by Earth Rover, which uses autonomous farming drones to monitor crops and remove weeds without the need for chemical herbicides.)
Notably for Canadians, there’s another benefit: effective GPS in the far North. GPS satellites’ orbits mean that their signals have difficulty reaching the far North (or the far South). That makes navigation challenging in some of the most remote parts of the country, and also ones where reliable navigation is critically important. Pulsar, however, doesn’t have that restriction; Xona’s satellites can easily be put into orbits that cross over the Arctic and provide navigational signals in the North.
That’s why Xona opened an international office in Montreal, and why it received a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) SmartEarth grant worth $495,120 for research related to remote sensing and navigation — along with support from the Space Technology Development Program and the Canada-European Space Agency Cooperation Agreement.
Once the system is up and running, it can finally resolve the Northern problem, and provide precise navigational capabilities as well.
FCC clearance and production launches
The company described the Pulsar as “the first commercially funded navigation satellite ever launched,” and the first Pulsar satellite was launched in June 2025. Xona’s FCC announcement helps clear the way for full deployment.
On Aug. 3, they revealed that the American Federal Communications Commission had “authorized Xona to broadcast Pulsar navigation signals from our full constellation of more than 250 satellites in Low Earth Orbit,” marking “the last regulatory milestone needed to advance Pulsar from demonstration to scaled deployment.”
With that clearance done, Xona said that it will be launching “our first six production Pulsar satellites” in October. Other satellites are “already being built in our satellite production facility,” and “partners are integrating our signals into existing devices.”
While Xona didn’t give a timeframe for completing their constellation, the company said that this authorization allows them to “deploy our complete system in the years ahead.”
Defeating GPS jamming and spoofing
The other August announcement reveals a potential reason why the Pulsar rollout “in the years ahead” might end up being accelerated: mitigating the serious threat of GPS/GNSS jamming and spoofing.
On Aug. 4, one day after the FCC announcement, Japanese electronics company Furuno Electric Co. announced that they were “the first company in Japan to receive signals transmitted from Xona’s Pulsar,” including in a “GNSS spoofing test environment.” The tests were conducted at the Fukushima Robot Test Field, and included spoofing attacks that disrupted traditional GNSS signals.
Furuno said that they were able to receive the PNT signals from Pulsar “with only minor firmware modifications,” despite the interference.
This gets to the other potentially critical advantage of Xona’s Pulsar: it’s jamming- and spoof-resistant. As both companies and militaries become more dependent on GPS and GNSS signals in order to determine their position, the possibility of those signals being jammed or even spoofed with fake positioning data becomes an ever-growing threat.
As Furuno said, “risks such as jamming, spoofing, and service disruptions” can pose significant threats to critical infrastructure. “Mobile communications, broadcasting, financial transactions, power grid control, and public safety radio” can all be affected or disrupted if there’s a GNSS outage.
As autonomous vehicles and drones become more common in both civilian business and national security operations, the potential disruption will only increase.
It can become dangerous for aviation, as well. Back in May, a medical plane crashed in New Mexico during military jamming in the area, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had her plane’s GPS system jammed on its way to Bulgaria in September of last year. There have even been reports of “mysterious, second-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe,” ones that have been potentially caused by Russian satellites jamming European GNSS signals.
These incidents show that even steering clear of well-known conflict zones may not be enough. Entire continents could be affected, and targeted attacks could happen beyond active combat zones.
Xona’s Pulsar constellation may end up becoming an extremely important strategic asset in that kind of environment. Pulsar’s stronger and more reliable signal can resist jamming, and Xona’s encryption of the signal can help to resist spoofing.
With growing concerns over potential use of anti-satellite weaponry, a distributed constellation of LEO satellites is also both easier to repair and replace compared to larger GPS/GNSS satellites in MEO, with less lost coverage if any single satellite becomes unavailable.
And that might well mean it ends up becoming an even better investment by the Canadian government. Access to a positioning system that works in the North would already be beneficial to Canada. Having one that’s also resistant to jamming, spoofing, and even kinetic threats, though, may become a critically important asset if (or when) Arctic shipping and resources turn it into contested territory.
Moving quickly on protected PNT
Xona Co-Founder and CTO Tyler Reid highlighted the importance of moving quickly on dealing with these threats in their announcement of the “Pulsar Verified” program, which is helping companies build compatible “chipsets, receivers, devices and simulation tools.”
Reid said that they’re focused on moving as quickly as possible, because jamming and spoofing are “now affecting the commercial systems the world depends on every day.” Reid added that the next step for Xona is to make the capability to use these hardened positioning capabilities “available to all devices and systems that need it.”