GPS is decades old, its signals are faint, and its jamming and spoofing vulnerabilities are now a routine feature of conflict. A new generation of companies wants to fix that from low Earth orbit. US11513232B2, granted to Xona Space Systems on November 29, 2022, claims a "satellite for broadcasting high precision data" — the heart of that pitch.
The CPC is unusually clean: G01S 19/02, the classification for satellite radio-beacon positioning systems augmenting other systems. A single, on-point code is itself a signal — this is a focused PNT claim, not a sprawling systems patent.
The mechanism rests on geometry and power. A LEO satellite is roughly twenty times closer to the user than a GPS satellite in medium Earth orbit, so its signal arrives far stronger — much harder to jam — and the rapidly changing geometry can improve positioning convergence. The claimed satellite broadcasts high-precision data tailored to exploit that closer vantage, enabling accuracy and resilience legacy GPS struggles to match.
For PNT-resilience analysts, this is a key record. The strategic anxiety around GPS dependence — military and civilian alike — has made LEO-PNT one of the most watched whitespaces in the sector, and Xona is among the names staking early priority in it.
The standard discipline applies: a publication is not a grant and a grant is not a deployed constellation. This patent protects Xona's specific high-precision-broadcast approach, not LEO-PNT as a concept, which others (including TrustPoint and government programs) also pursue. But it documents, with a clean priority date, where a serious contender planted its flag in the race to give the world a GPS that is harder to switch off.