Coverage Characteristics of the Baseline Navstar GPS Satellite Constellation

Daniel Y. Chen

Abstract:	The baseline constellation of the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) consists of 18 satellites uniformly distributed in six inclined orbit planes. Simulation of worldwide coverage over 24 hours requires a large number of computations. This computational load can be reduced by a factor of 144 if advantage is taken of the symmetries of the constellation. This paper first identifies these symmetries, and then applies them to study the coverage characteristics of the constellation as functions of the inclination angle. It is found that coverage would be improved if the inclination angle were increased from the baseline value of 55 degrees. The major advantages of this increase are: (1) Percentage of time when outage occurs is reduced by more than half. (2) The outages are confined to mid-latitude areas rather than both mid- and high-latitude areas, and their sizes are smaller. (3) The position dilution of precision (PDOP) is more uniform.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1984 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 17 - 19, 1984 San Diego, CA
Pages:	48 - 54
Cite this article:	Chen, Daniel Y., "Coverage Characteristics of the Baseline Navstar GPS Satellite Constellation," Proceedings of the 1984 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Diego, CA, January 1984, pp. 48-54.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In