Riverside County Success Story

StarNav’s core area of business is bringing products to the market that convert ambient radio signals into positioning, navigation, and timing information for safe navigation that is completely independent of GPS. StarNav has strategic partners and customers in the commercial sector and within the US Department of Defense.

In 2021, StarNav LLC was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $256,000 to conduct research and development on a network of receiver ground stations that will be deployed around the globe to extract position, navigation, and timing (PNT) information from low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite signals. GPS signals, which are used in state-of-the-art navigation devices, can become unreliable when vehicles move under dense foliage or between tall buildings and compromised by malicious jamming or spoofing attacks. The work performed under this grant will have wide impacting implications in transportation, search and rescue, weather monitoring, climate research, emergency-911 caller locating abilities, and more.

“The demonstration of GPS vulnerabilities in space and on the ground are increasing in numbers year by year. We are excited to be selected for this award, which gives us the opportunity to work with the U.S. Air Force and our university partner OPL to bring new position and navigation solutions to Department of Defense customers,” said Dr. Joshua Morales, CEO of StarNav.

Early 2022, StarNav LLC was awarded a $750,000 contract from the United States Air Force AFWERX program. Under this contract, StarNav will tailor their alternative positioning system for use on U.S. Air Force aircraft during intentional GPS jamming tests.

The U.S. Air Force routinely conducts intentional GPS jamming events at various test centers to evaluate the performance of existing and new systems. These systems under test require a “ground truth” reference system. This contract will deliver a reference system that does not require the deployment of infrastructure or modifications to the external body of the aircraft, solving pain points in existing solutions.