Efficient DME/TACAN Blanking Method for GNSS-based Navigation in Civil Aviation

Axel Garcia-Pena, Olivier Julien, Paul Verlaine Gakne, Christophe Macabiau, Mikael Mabilleau, Pierre Durel

Abstract:	In the context of the evaluation of the GNSS L5/E5a interference environment dominated by DME/TACAN and JTIDS/MIDS pulses, RTCA DO-292, 2004 [1] proposes a model to compute the blanker duty cycle and the equivalent noise level contribution of the non-blanked interference; however the corresponding blanker model is not clear. That blanker cannot be a pure envelope detector triggering the blanker by comparing at each epoch the magnitude of the envelope of each individual single interference pulse to a threshold, as it may have been assumed in [1]. Also, for standardization purposes, it is proposed to define a very simple mechanism validating the operation of a GNSS receiver in the L5/E5a environment, also defined as a minimum blanker. In this paper, three simple blanker mechanisms were tested assuming the US hot spot DME/TACAN environment: Instantaneous blanker, Average power and Blank-and-Hold blankers. This study shows that the Instantaneous Blanker is not providing adequate performance, nor the Blank-and-Hold mechanism. It also shows that the Average Power blanker with a window of 0.5 µs allows to obtain performance very similar to that of the analytical model based on the [1] blanking methodology.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019) September 16 - 20, 2019 Hyatt Regency Miami Miami, Florida
Pages:	1438 - 1452
Cite this article:	Garcia-Pena, Axel, Julien, Olivier, Gakne, Paul Verlaine, Macabiau, Christophe, Mabilleau, Mikael, Durel, Pierre, "Efficient DME/TACAN Blanking Method for GNSS-based Navigation in Civil Aviation," Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019), Miami, Florida, September 2019, pp. 1438-1452. https://doi.org/10.33012/2019.16993
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