An analysis of observations from China's first medium earth orbit satellite Compass M-1 is presented, with main focus on the first orbit and clock solution for this satellite. The orbit is computed from laser ranging measurements. Based on this orbit solution, the apparent clock offset is estimated using measurements from two GNSS receivers, which allow Compass tracking. The analysis of the clock solutions reveals unexpectedly high dynamics in the pseudorange and carrier-phase observations. Furthermore, carrier-to-noise density ratio, pseudorange noise, and multipath are analyzed and compared to GPS and GIOVE. The results of the clock analysis motivate further research on the signals of the geostationary satellites of the Compass constellation.

No abstract

Scintillations are rapid fluctuations in the phase and amplitude of transionospheric radio signals which are caused by small-scale plasma density irregularities in the ionosphere. In the case of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, scintillation can cause cycle slips, degrade the positioning accuracy and, when severe enough, can even lead to a complete loss of signal lock. Thus, the required levels of availability, accuracy, integrity and reliability for the GNSS applications may not be met during scintillation occurrence; this poses a major threat to a large number of modern-day GNSS-based applications. The whole of Latin America, Brazil in particular, is located in one of the regions most affected by scintillations. These effects will be exacerbated during solar maxima, the next predicted for 2013. This paper presents initial results from a research work aimed to tackle ionospheric scintillation effects for GNSS users in Latin America. This research is a part of the CIGALA (Concept for Ionospheric Scintillation Mitigation for Professional GNSS in Latin America) project, co-funded by the EC Seventh Framework Program and supervised by the GNSS Supervisory Authority (GSA), which aims to develop and test ionospheric scintillation countermeasures to be implemented in multi-frequency, multi-constellation GNSS receivers.

Analysis of GIOVE-A signals is an important part of the in-orbit validation phase of the Galileo program. GIOVE-A transmits the ranging signals using all the code modulations currently foreseen for the future Galileo and provides a foretaste of their performance in real-life applications. Due to the use of advanced code modulations, the ranging signals of Galileo provide significant improvement of the multipath performance as compared to current GPS. In this paper, we summarize the results of about 1.5 years of observations using the data from four antenna sites. The analysis of the elevation dependence of averaged multipath errors and the multipath time series for static data indicate significant suppression of long-range multipath by the best Galileo codes. The E5AltBOC signal is confirmed to be a multipath suppression champion for all the data sets. According to the results of the observations, the Galileo signals can be classified into 3 groups: high-performance (E5AltBOC, L1A, E6A), mediumperformance (E6BC, E5a, E5b) and an L1BC signal, which has the lowest performance among Galileo signals, but is still better than GPS-CA. The car tests have demonstrated that for kinematic multipath the intersignal differences are a lot less pronounced. The phase multipath performance is also discussed.