The four wheel-drive vehicles can host a three-person team and are crammed with dedicated navigation and telecommunications monitoring equipment: satellite navigation receivers, antennas that range from the most sophisticated to mass market grade, interference monitoring equipment, antijamming antennas and other interference mitigation systems.

An inertial navigation system on board serves as the ‘source of truth’, an independent relative positioning reference to compare readings from the receivers to the actual position of the vehicle. Special batteries to power instruments, as well as plenty of radiofrequency equipment and battery back-ups are also needed during test campaigns.

The vans are based at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), ESA’s technical heart in Noordwijk, the Netherlands and are usually driven around South Holland, both in rural areas and in more challenging urban environments like the heart of Rotterdam. But they can operate anywhere in Europe and have crossed Dutch borders to join international test campaigns like Jammertest in the north of Norway.