The bridge is not short of information. It is short of a way to decide.

What is actually happening

Standing guidance from UK Maritime Trade Operations to mariners in the region: use alternative positioning methods and report anomalies. That sentence is a problem statement. SENTINEL is an answer to it.

One casualty, in detail

MSC ANTONIA, 10 May 2025. A 304-metre Liberian-flagged container ship on passage from Marsa Bashayer to Jeddah ran aground on Eliza Shoals.

Pole Star confirmed GPS interference as the cause — threat actors introducing false signals the receiver accepted as genuine. Satellite imagery placed the ship inside the shoal area while its AIS reported positions well to the south. Windward reached the same conclusion independently. Salvage ran over five weeks.

Pole Star characterised the attack as unsophisticated.

The day before, UKMTO had reports from several vessels in the Red Sea whose navigation was disrupted for hours.

What SENTINEL would have had to do

1. Refuse the fix. A spoofed position places the vessel somewhere it could not physically have reached in the elapsed time. SENTINEL tests every report against how far that source could plausibly have moved, and rejects the ones that fail — recording the refusal and its reason rather than discarding it silently.
2. Drop the count. GPS stops being a participating source. The system now knows it is running on inertial, radar and chart alone — as a declared fact, not an inference.
3. Change state, visibly. Trust falls to a declared degraded state with a declared response. Not a dialog box a tired officer can dismiss at 0300.
4. Withhold the irreversible action. Nothing that cannot be undone is released while the picture does not reconcile. On a bridge with autopilot engaged, that is the whole argument.
5. Prove it afterwards. The interval replays byte-for-byte. The casualty investigation reads a record, not a reconstruction.

The one condition — and we lead with it

SENTINEL needs at least one source that does not depend on GNSS.

If the inertial unit is GPS-aided, the radar is GPS-referenced and the ship's clock is GPS-disciplined, a single spoof moves all of them together in the same direction. They agree, and they are all wrong. Comparison has nothing to work with.

So the first question in any maritime deployment is not about our software. It is: on this bridge, what is genuinely independent of GPS, and what only looks independent? We would rather establish that before a pilot than during one.

What it is not

• Not a GNSS receiver, and not an anti-spoofing antenna. It does nothing at RF and does not compete with authenticated signals or multi-antenna discrimination. It sits above all of them and decides what to do when they disagree.
• Not sea-proven. Simulation only — no sea trial, no hardware-in-the-loop, no real jammer, no installed base. Closing that gap is what we are seeking partners and Phase II funding for.
• Not type-approved. No class society approval, no shipboard certification.

Who this is for

Operators and owners carrying grounding and collision risk in jamming corridors. P&I clubs and hull underwriters who want evidence, not a narrative, when a claim arrives. Class societies and flag administrations writing guidance on GNSS resilience. Defense integrators working assured PNT, where the same argument applies with a harder adversary.

What we want from you

A conversation with someone who has stood the watch, and — if you have it — real failure data. A recorded interval where the position disagreed with the radar picture is worth more to us than any amount of simulation.

info@rvappliedsystems.com · RV Applied Systems, Inc., Las Vegas, Nevada

Four US provisional patent applications filed. Patent pending; none examined or granted.