NovAtel

NovAtel started in Calgary in 1978 as a maker of GPS receiver technology and grew into one of the handful of companies that define precision GNSS. Hexagon AB bought the company in 2007 and folded it into what is now Hexagon's Autonomous Solutions business area, but the NovAtel name and its Calgary engineering base stayed put, and the products still carry the brand into survey, mapping, autonomous vehicle, and defense markets worldwide. The core of the business is the OEM7 receiver family, a line of GNSS receiver cards and boards spanning the compact OEM719 up through the higher-performance OEM7600 and OEM7700, all built to track multiple satellite constellations and frequencies at once. Around that receiver core sits the GRIT firmware suite, which adds interference detection and spoofing resistance, a feature that matters as much to a survey crew working near a jammer as it does to a military user operating in contested electromagnetic terrain. NovAtel packages these receivers into finished hardware too, including the PwrPak7 line of enclosures and the SMART7 and SMART2 all-in-one antenna-receiver units.

Inertial navigation is the second leg of the business, built around SPAN, NovAtel's technology for fusing GNSS with an inertial measurement unit so that a vehicle keeps a usable position and orientation solution even when satellite signals drop out. The PwrPak7-E1 and PwrPak7-E2, along with the dual-antenna PwrPak7D variants, combine an OEM7 receiver with an Epson IMU in a single ruggedized enclosure, a format that shows up on everything from surveying rigs to unmanned platforms. Defense and anti-jam technology is where NovAtel's positioning work turns explicitly military. GAJT, its GNSS anti-jam antenna technology, uses adaptive digital nulling to keep a positioning signal usable in the presence of jamming, while RoDAR takes a different approach, using a dual-polarized antenna and receiver-based spatial processing to null out both narrowband and wideband interference without a separate antenna array. NovAtel markets these specifically for assured positioning, navigation, and timing on military platforms operating where GPS can't be trusted to just work.

Because it sits inside Hexagon rather than standing alone, NovAtel's technology also feeds into Hexagon's broader autonomous systems and geospatial businesses, but the receiver cards, SPAN inertial systems, and anti-jam antennas that built its name in the GNSS world are still developed and built out of the same Calgary campus that made NovAtel one of the earliest independent GPS receiver companies in North America. Defense customers tend to buy NovAtel components as building blocks rather than finished weapons or vehicles, which keeps the company somewhat below the radar compared to a prime contractor, but its receivers and anti-jam antennas end up integrated into a wide range of platforms that need trustworthy positioning in contested electromagnetic environments, from ground vehicles to airborne systems to unmanned platforms that can't afford to lose track of where they are. That component-level role, supplying the positioning core that other integrators build around, is exactly what has kept NovAtel a name defense engineers reach for even though it rarely appears on a finished platform's spec sheet.