GPS navigation data bit decoding error during strong equatorial scintillation

Abstract

Strong equatorial scintillation is often characterized by simultaneous fast phase changes and deep amplitude fading. The combined effect poses a challenge for GNSS receiver carrier tracking performance. One of the consequences of the strong scintillation is increased navigation message data bit decoding error. Understanding the rate of the data bit decoding error under equatorial scintillation is essential for high accuracy and high integrity applications. We present the statistical relationship between the data bit decoding error occurrences and the intensity of amplitude scintillation based on the processing of intermediate frequency GPS scintillation data collected on Ascension Island in March 2013. A third-order phase lock loop (PLL) is implemented to process the data and to access the data bit error typically expected in conventional receivers. A Kalman filter-based PLL is also used to process the same data to demonstrate that the data bit decoding error can be reduced through advanced carrier tracking designs.

Assessing the Positioning Performance Under the Effects of Strong Ionospheric Anomalies With Multi‐GNSS in Hong Kong

“…It can affect both the Earth's upper atmosphere and propagation of radio waves (Yasyukevich et al, 2018); it is more frequent and stronger near the solar maximum. The ionospheric perturbations result in amplitude and phase fluctuations in the received signal (Kintner et al, 2007; Xu et al, 2015; Vilà‐Valls et al, 2017; Xu & Morton, 2018), a phenomenon known as scintillation. The major scintillation activity is usually observed during the solar maximum period, near the magnetic equator and in the midnight sector (Basu et al, 1988: Priyadarshi, 2015).…”

Characterization and mitigation of multipath fading on multi-frequency GNSS signals in urban environment

“…The signal intensity (SI) can be obtained from the correlation values in in-phase (I) channel and quadrature (Q) channel from the receiver baseband tracking loop outputs [14,16]:…”

“…where <•> represents the averaging operation over the interval of interest [16]. A moving window with length of 10 s is used to obtain the value of S 4 in each second.…”

“…where <•> represents the moving averaging operation over the interval of interest [16]. The moving window size relates to the phase measurement rate, such as 50-100 Hz, which corresponds to the integration time range as 10-20 ms.…”