JUN HO LEE at Pexels Long before satellites, sailors and migratory animals shared a navigation trick humans couldn't sense on their own: the planet's magnetic field. Salmon return to their birth river, sea turtles cross oceans, and migratory birds fly thousands of kilometers, all guided by tiny shifts in Earth's magnetism too faint for us to feel. Today, that same invisible signal is being turned into a sensing platform. QMX builds a software-defined quantum magnetometer — a

QMX Insights · May 2026 A passenger jet crosses the Baltic at thirty-five thousand feet. Nothing looks wrong from a window seat. But in the cockpit, the satellite navigation has just gone blank — or worse, started reporting a position that is confidently, dangerously false. The crew switches to backup procedures, and the flight lands safely. Then it happens to the next aircraft, and the next. This is no longer a rare event. Reporting over the past two years has documented ten

A magnetometer measures magnetic fields. Conventional magnetometers — the kind used in smartphones and some industrial sensors — are useful, but they have limits. They struggle with noise, require calibration, and miss the faint signals that carry the most valuable information. Most people have never heard of a quantum magnetometer. That's about to change. A quantum magnetometer operates on an entirely different principle. By exploiting the behaviour of atoms at the quantum l

GPS is remarkable — but it has a vulnerability. It depends on satellite signals that can be jammed, spoofed, or simply unavailable underground, underwater, or in contested environments. For autonomous vehicles, defence platforms, and critical infrastructure operators, GPS denial is not a hypothetical risk. It is a planning assumption. The question is: what replaces it? One answer lies in Earth's own magnetic field. Every location on the planet has a unique magnetic signature