FCC clears its first private company to broadcast a GPS-adjacent signal from orbit

The Federal Communications Commission on August 3 authorized Xona Space Systems to broadcast its own radio navigation signal from low Earth orbit, the first time a private company has been cleared to operate in the radio neighborhood immediately adjacent to the GPS band. Xona is positioning Pulsar not as a replacement for GPS, but as a commercial layer riding on top of the existing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that also includes Europe's Galileo, China's BeiDou, and Russia's GLONASS.

The regulatory change is the story, not the hardware. Under the FCC's experimental license, Xona's demo satellite Pulsar-0 launched in mid-2025 on a SpaceX rideshare and has since completed more than 350 live transmission passes across four continents, according to the company's announcement. Full constellation authorization lets the Burlingame, California-based company scale that approach to a planned network of more than 250 satellites, with the first six production-class Pulsar satellites scheduled to launch in October 2026.

Xona is also making a structural bet on how the new signal gets into existing devices. Its architecture is designed so legacy GNSS receivers can process Pulsar broadcasts through firmware or software updates, without dedicated silicon redesigns. That compatibility claim, if it holds up in the field, is what distinguishes this authorization from a private version of the GPS program: adoption is a software push rather than a hardware cycle.

The company markets Pulsar's received signal power at up to 100 times stronger than traditional MEO GPS, with centimeter-class precision positioning and a dynamic cryptographic watermark meant to defeat spoofing and jamming. Those performance figures come from Xona's own product page and the company announcement, not from independent measurement, and they are the first place a careful reader should put a pin. The 100x number is a received-power comparison from low Earth orbit, where the satellites are closer to receivers than the GPS constellation in medium Earth orbit, so the geometry helps; it is not a claim about consumer-visible accuracy. Centimeter precision depends on correction services and ground infrastructure that Pulsar is not yet operating at scale.

The FCC authorization, the SpaceNews write-up, and the SatNews re-report all describe a network of more than 250 satellites. Xona's own Pulsar product page puts the figure at "approximately 300 satellites." The 250 figure is the regulatory record and the one to cite when describing the license; the higher number is a planning figure on the company's marketing material.

Xona closed a $170 million Series C in late March 2026 to fund production, naming the same three target markets the company has been pitching since the demo phase: autonomous transport, critical infrastructure, and defense. The October launch will be the first concrete data point on whether a commercial L-band signal can land in a fleet that is not waiting on a new chip.

What the FCC actually did on August 3 was draw a regulatory line that makes this kind of commercial L-band broadcast legal at all. Everything downstream, from the 100x signal claim to the centimeter precision marketing to the firmware-only adoption pitch, is a bet on how the industry will use that opening. The first six satellites launching in October will tell the field whether the bet pays.