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Session C3: Frontiers of Radionavigation: Signals of Opportunity, 5G, LEO, and Beyond

Innovations in Signals of Opportunity User Navigation Algorithms
Andrew Blackney, Alan Choy, Hayden Crabbs, John Janeski, Lauren Monzon, Phillip Vu, Joseph Zales, Eugene Grayver, Robert Nelson, Ron Trerotola, Ashtin Cheng, Nicholas A Oune, Kevin Sauerwein, Daniel Thomlinson, The Aerospace Corporation
Location: Grand Ballroom IJ
Date/Time: Wednesday, Apr. 30, 11:03 a.m.

Signals of Opportunity (SoOp) have gained growing attention over the past decade for their potential use as supplemental PNT sources. There are ongoing concerns about the state of Global Positioning System (GPS) signals that can be jammed, denied, or unavailable to the user. The world is reliant on the use of GPS and its unavailability would cause huge impacts to the military and billions of other users. Using SoOp can expand, augment, and deliver improved PNT service and resilience to the user. Some of the benefits for using SoOp include satellite orbit and spectrum diversity, leveraging commercial assets, and an overall greater number of satellites in the sky. This paper presents results from a study and an experimental campaign to combine multiple SoOP into a complete user receiver. The receiver uses a Kalman filter to combine combines inputs from an IMU, Starlink, Orbcomm, Navy AltNav, and GNSS. The Starlink signal processing is described in detail. Since all Starlink SVs transmit the same preamble, it is challenging to reliably associate one of the thousands of SVs with a particular set of observables extracted from the downlink. This paper presents a novel approach to this problem, using the difference in the times of arrival to detect incorrectly associated SVs. The paper also presents some new results on the clock stability of the Starlink SVs based on observed on-board clock corrections.

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