The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) last week awarded contracts to nine Complementary Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) technology vendors. DOT says the awards, which total $7.2 million and awarded through its Volpe Center, will allow it to conduct real-world field tests of commercial PNT technologies.
DOT said because GPS relies on signals broadcast from satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO), “its signal strength at the receiver is low and thus vulnerable to intentional and unintentional disruptions.”
Companies and their award amount:
The contracts were in response to the DOT Complementary PNT Action Plan. Overall, DOT says the funding will be for instrumentation, testing, and evaluation of Complementary PNT technologies at field test ranges in conjunction with critical infrastructure owners and operators.
“DOT is impressed with the quality of the proposal responses and received more proposals than could be funded under Simplified Acquisition Procedure guidelines. DOT intends to move expeditiously to issue a Complementary PNT Rapid Phase II solicitation to expand the set of Complementary PNT technologies to be evaluated,” said Robert Hampshire, DOT chief science officer, in a statement.
One of the awards went to NextNav $NN, which will offer 3D PNT technologies, which are terrestrial solutions. In 2021, the company said that DOT recognized its technology for indoor/outdoor positioning, including vertical location.
NextNav is petitioning the FCC to reconfigure the lower 900 MHz spectrum band (902-928 MHz) to optimize its use for a terrestrial complement and backup to GPS as well as additional spectrum for 5G broadband, the company said.
 last week awarded contracts to nine Complementary Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) technology vendors. DOT says the awards, which total $7.2 million and awarded through its Volpe Center, will allow it to conduct real-world field tests of commercial PNT technologies.){kind=link}