Innovative Toolbox for Reference Station Multipath and Interference Site Surveying

A. Emmanuele, M. Puccitelli, N. Pastori, A. Ferrario, L. Marradi, A. Khanal, P. Crosta, R. Sarnadas, T. Thúróczy, R. Guidi

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Surveys of potential sites for GNSS ground reference sensor stations play a fundamental role for assessing the multipath and RF interference environments of the candidate locations. The outcomes of such surveys can be either used for site acceptance, characterization and investigate of on-site installed antenna plus receiver platforms or even expected performance in simulated scenarios based on the conditions surveyed in real sites. The main target of this paper is to show the post-processing capabilities provided by an advanced Toolbox for site survey applications, which embeds also an ad-hoc set of innovative techniques for multipath parameters estimation and RF interference Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimation through received power minimization. The Toolbox is based on multi-constellation, multi-frequency GNSS observables, retrieved at different levels: raw measurements from RINEX files, which include pseudoranges, carrier phase and C/N0 values for GPS and Galileo signals are used for a high-level characterization and site statistics provision, then in-depth analyses, exploiting either pre-correlation and post-correlation techniques, are available in the post-processing Toolbox, based respectively on IF samples and I/Q multicorrelator outputs. The paper proposes a high-level overview of the survey equipment architecture, composed mainly by three elements: the Antenna, the Receiver and the Post-Processing Toolbox SW running on a standard PC/laptop. In particular, in one of the equipment configurations, a High-Sensitivity receiver (HS-RX) with dual-input is connected to a DualPolarization Antenna (DPA), in order to provide a complete site multipath and interference analysis, which takes benefits from both RHCP and LHCP sensed polarizations. The capability of the Toolbox to accept up to two databases, collected in parallel by two (independent) chains, allows the provision of standard and new figures of merit for common site survey applications and innovative comparative activities amidst acquisition chains in different RF sites environmental conditions.
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:	3327 - 3341
Cite this article:	Emmanuele, A., Puccitelli, M., Pastori, N., Ferrario, A., Marradi, L., Khanal, A., Crosta, P., Sarnadas, R., Thúróczy, T., Guidi, R., "Innovative Toolbox for Reference Station Multipath and Interference Site Surveying," Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019), Miami, Florida, September 2019, pp. 3327-3341. https://doi.org/10.33012/2019.17103
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