Detection pipeline
From aircraft broadcast to published alert. Stage labels are read from the canonical capability status; a stage is only claimed as live where that source says so.
- 01
Aircraft ADS-B broadcasts
Aircraft continuously broadcast position quality indicators (NIC, NACp and SIL) derived from their onboard GNSS solution.
- 02
Sovereign UK sensor network
Company-owned ground nodes on UK territory receive those broadcasts and aggregate them into grid cells over short time windows.
- 03
Direct RF interference measurement
No live RF nodeRF-capable nodes measure the GNSS bands themselves: noise floor, AGC, C/N0 and jamming indicators.
- 04
Post-quantum signed telemetry
Live on all current nodesEach telemetry batch is signed with ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204) at the sensor and verified at ingest before storage, so its origin can be verified long after collection.
- 05
Encrypted transport
Signed batches travel to the sovereign ingest endpoint over authenticated, encrypted channels.
- 06
Real-time anomaly detection
Not live; operator-curatedCell-level degradation is scored continuously; sustained clusters are submitted for operator review. Event records are opened, revised and closed manually.
- 07
Tamper-evident evidence chain
LiveEvery telemetry record is committed to a hash-chained block with a Merkle root. Each block header is independently timestamped by the Bitcoin blockchain (OpenTimestamps) and by an RFC 3161 timestamp authority (DigiCert). Recent blocks are anchored on the next scheduled run.
- 08
Live map, API and alerts
Results are published to the public map and, for subscribers, to real-time feeds, webhooks and alerting.
How ADS-B reveals GNSS interference
Aircraft transmit not just their position but how much they trust it. NIC (Navigation Integrity Category) and NACp (Navigation Accuracy Category, position) collapse when the receiver loses confidence in its GNSS solution. A single aircraft reporting low integrity is unremarkable; dozens of unrelated aircraft doing so inside the same volume of airspace, at the same time, is a signature of interference on the ground or in the air. PNTMAP™ aggregates those reports per grid cell and per time window so the pattern, not the individual aircraft, is what raises an alert.
Direct RF sensing
ADS-B shows that multiple receivers may be degrading. RF sensing helps determine whether that degradation coincides with abnormal conditions in the GNSS bands. RF-capable nodes measure the GNSS bands directly: the noise floor in L1 and L5, receiver AGC behaviour, mean carrier-to-noise density across tracked satellites, satellite count, and hardware jamming indicators. Combining an airborne integrity signature with a ground-level RF measurement turns a statistical anomaly into a corroborated observation.
Jamming detection
Jamming raises the noise floor and starves receivers of usable signal. On the ADS-B side it looks like a sharp, spatially bounded rise in the proportion of low-NIC aircraft, often with a clear gradient towards the emitter. On the RF side it looks like elevated noise, depressed C/N0 and a rising jamming indicator with no corresponding change in satellite geometry. PNTMAP™ scores both, and where a degradation persists across successive windows it is submitted for operator review and, if accepted, published as a jamming-consistent ADS-B anomaly with a severity band. Jamming itself is only reported once a direct RF measurement corroborates it, and no live RF node exists today.
Spoofing detection
Spoofing is harder: receivers stay confident while being wrong. The tells are inconsistency between independent observations: reported positions that disagree with the geometry of the signal actually received, implausible clock behaviour, and clusters of aircraft converging on identical false solutions. Robust discrimination requires multilateration cross-checks between several nodes observing the same aircraft, so spoofing confidence rises as the network densifies. With one node, PNTMAP™ reports what it can measure and says so.
Why provenance matters
Interference data is only useful if it can be trusted later, whether in a safety investigation, an insurance claim, a regulatory filing or a national security assessment. That means knowing which sensor produced a measurement, that the record has not been altered since, and that the operator is contractable and accountable. On PNTMAP™ every record carries a verifiable node signature and sits under a Merkle root whose block header is independently timestamped by the Bitcoin blockchain and by an RFC 3161 timestamp authority, rather than resting on the good faith of a distant third party.
What quantum-resistant cryptography does not do here
ML-DSA signing and independent block-header timestamping protect the authenticity and integrity of records after collection: they make it possible to prove that a given node produced a given measurement and that nobody edited it afterwards. They do not secure or authenticate the GNSS signal itself, they do not prevent jamming or spoofing, and they do not make the detection analysis cryptographically verifiable. The detection is a statistical judgement; the cryptography protects the evidence trail around it. Any published event should be read on that basis.