Beam Pointing in Rotorcraft Mounted GPS Receivers

Y.C. Chuang, A.J. O'Brien, I.J. Gupta, Y. Bayram

Abstract:	We discuss the performance of rotorcraft mounted beam pointing GPS receivers when beam pointing is carried out without any consideration of the rotor blades, that is, same weights are used to carry out beam pointing for all positions and orientation of the blades. These weights can be obtained using the geometry of the antenna or the array manifold from antenna mounted on a ground plane and/or the average array manifold (averaged over all positions and orientations of the blades). We show that with fixed weights, one does not take a big hit in C/N. The antenna induced biases can increase somewhat. However, with proper calibration, one should be able to maintain the desired accuracy. This is especially true when array manifolds on a ground plane or average array manifolds are used in beam pointing. The same is true for optimum adaptive filtering. With average array manifold, the optimum adaptive filtering provides a little better performance than simple beam forming. On the other hand, with antenna array manifold on a ground plane, the two approaches lead to similar performance.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2012 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 30 - 1, 2012 Marriott Newport Beach Hotel & Spa Newport Beach, CA
Pages:	1866 - 1874
Cite this article:	Chuang, Y.C., O'Brien, A.J., Gupta, I.J., Bayram, Y., "Beam Pointing in Rotorcraft Mounted GPS Receivers," Proceedings of the 2012 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Newport Beach, CA, January 2012, pp. 1866-1874.
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