Joint Tracking and Beacon Refinement of Wideband Starlink LEO Signals for PNT

Faezeh Mooseli, Sharbel Kozhaya, and Zaher M. Kassas

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	An adaptive opportunistic navigation receiver is developed, which capable of exploiting the full 240 MHz bandwidth of Starlink Ku-band downlink signals, while refining the Starlink beacon. The receiver operates in two stages: an acquisition stage for source detection and a tracking stage that adaptively updates the beacon to capture both static and satellite-specific components. This refinement increases the effective processing gain and improves the correlation with the received signal. In addition, leveraging the full channel bandwidth enhances resolution in both the delay and Doppler domains. Experimental validation with real wideband Starlink recordings demonstrates significant performance gains compared to narrowband processing, specifically: the ability to track more satellites; over 15 dB improvement in carrier-to-noise density ratio (C/N0), namely, C/N0 exceeding 70 dB-Hz; nanosecond-level code phase accuracy; and reduced Doppler estimation error variance. These results confirm that adaptive beacon refinement combined with wideband processing enables robust acquisition and precise tracking, even in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 38th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2025) September 8 - 12, 2025 Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor Baltimore, Maryland
Pages:	2817 - 2826
Cite this article:	Mooseli, Faezeh, Kozhaya, Sharbel, Kassas, Zaher M., "Joint Tracking and Beacon Refinement of Wideband Starlink LEO Signals for PNT," Proceedings of the 38th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2025), Baltimore, Maryland, September 2025, pp. 2817-2826. https://doi.org/10.33012/2025.20460
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