Commercial Ionospheric Scintillation Monitoring Receiver Development and Test Results

A. J. Van Dierendonck, Quyen Hua, Pat Fenton, John Klobuchar

Abstract:	GPS signals provide an excellent means for measuring ionospheric scintillation effects on a disperse global basis because they are continuously available and can be measured through many points of the ionosphere simultaneously. GPS signals are themselves affected, but because of the spread spectrum properties of the signal, tracking through disturbances with a GPS receiver is usually possible with reasonably wide bandwidth tracking loops, and scintillation parameters can be extracted. Thus, GPS provides an excellent means for monitoring ionospheric scintillation if the cost of this monitoring can be minimized. This paper presents the results of a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) two-phase development and testing of a software-modified commercial GPS C/A code receiver to perform this function. This development resulted in a low-cost Ionospheric Scintillation Monitor (ISM) that has been transformed into a commercial product. In addition, some problems encountered during development along with their solutions are also presented. Also, some observations are presented to provide an insight on how operational GPS receivers would be affected by ionospheric scintillation.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1996) June 19 - 21, 1996 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	573 - 582
Cite this article:	Van Dierendonck, A. J., Hua, Quyen, Fenton, Pat, Klobuchar, John, "Commercial Ionospheric Scintillation Monitoring Receiver Development and Test Results," Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1996), Cambridge, MA, June 1996, pp. 573-582.
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