Naval Air Systems Command awarded Raytheon Company — an RTX business operating out of Fullerton, California and Cedar Rapids, Iowa — a $206.2 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract on April 28, 2026, to design, engineer, integrate, test, and deliver engineering development models of a Military Code (M-Code) GPS upgrade for the AN/USN-3(V)1 Joint Precision Approach and Landing System. The contract runs through April 2030, with $11.5 million in FY2026 research, development, test, and evaluation funds obligated at award. Raytheon will deliver four engineering development models for government testing and validation.
What JPALS Does and Why M-Code Matters
The Joint Precision Approach and Landing System is the technology that guides naval aircraft to carrier decks and amphibious ship landing spots in all weather conditions, day or night, with the precision required to catch an arresting wire on a moving 1,092-foot flight deck or land on a helicopter deck in rough seas. JPALS uses a differential GPS-based local area augmentation system: a ground reference station on the ship provides real-time GPS error corrections to approaching aircraft, enabling approach accuracy on the order of centimeters rather than the meters provided by standard GPS.
The current JPALS system uses civilian GPS signals, which creates a vulnerability: GPS jamming and spoofing have become commonplace in contested environments. Russia has demonstrated GPS jamming over Ukraine, the Baltic Sea, Finland, and Israel's airspace that has affected commercial and military aviation. In a major combat operation against a near-peer adversary, the GPS environment may be severely degraded — and a carrier strike group conducting flight operations in a jammed environment would face serious risks to flight safety and operational continuity.
Military Code (M-Code) GPS is the Pentagon's answer: a new GPS signal broadcast on a separate frequency from civilian signals, encrypted with U.S. military cryptography, transmitted at higher power to improve resistance to jamming, and designed to maintain accuracy even when civilian GPS signals are being jammed or spoofed. M-Code receivers are classified hardware that requires separate encryption key management — but they allow military aircraft, ships, and ground forces to navigate with high-precision GPS even in a denied electromagnetic environment.
Work Split: Fullerton and Cedar Rapids
Raytheon's JPALS work is split between two facilities reflecting its acquisition heritage. The Fullerton, California facility is the former Hughes Aircraft radar systems facility that became part of Raytheon through the 2000 acquisition of Hughes Electronics' defense units. It handles the systems engineering, software development, and testing portions of JPALS work. The Cedar Rapids, Iowa facility — formerly Collins Radio, then Rockwell Collins, acquired by UTC and then merged into Raytheon through the 2020 formation of RTX — is the home of Raytheon's GPS and precision navigation hardware, including the GPS receivers and signal processing electronics that are the heart of the M-Code upgrade.
Approximately 60 percent of the work will be performed in Fullerton and 40 percent in Cedar Rapids, per the contracting notice. The split reflects the relative labor content of integration and test work (Fullerton) versus hardware development (Cedar Rapids).
JPALS in the Fleet and Programmed Expansion
JPALS is currently operational on Nimitz-class and Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, as well as on America-class and Wasp-class amphibious assault ships. The system supports F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler, E-2D Hawkeye, C-2A Greyhound, and CMV-22B Osprey operations, as well as the F-35C Lightning II on carriers and F-35B on amphibious ships. As JPALS approaches full fleet implementation, the M-Code upgrade is the next major capability enhancement.
The four engineering development models will be tested against both a shipboard JPALS reference station and in a GPS jamming environment to validate the performance improvement over the current civilian-GPS-based system. Successful completion of developmental testing will lead to a production decision, expected in the early 2030s, that would retrofit the entire installed JPALS fleet to M-Code capability.
What It Means for Contractors
- Raytheon will need subcontractors for M-Code GPS receiver components, encryption hardware, and environmental testing — firms with GPS technology expertise and ITAR-controlled hardware experience should engage with Raytheon's Cedar Rapids procurement team.
- JPALS shipboard installation work — integrating the upgraded reference stations into carrier and amphibious ship electronics suites — will be a separate, competed scope managed by the respective platform program offices at NAVAIR and NAVSEA.
- Software-defined GPS receiver firms developing M-Code compatible chipsets should engage with the GPS Directorate at Space Systems Command, which manages M-Code signal architecture and receiver policy across all DoD programs.
- Watch for a future JPALS M-Code production contract in the 2030-2032 timeframe — the four EDMs funded by this contract will inform the production requirement and technical data package.