An Open Source Software Receiver for Bistatic Remote Sensing

Scott Gleason

Abstract:	This paper will present the design and performance of a software receiver intended specifically to process bistatically reflected signals from the Earh´s surface for purposes of remote sensing. One of the applications where software receivers have proven to be very useful is in the area of bistatic remote sensing. In the case of bistatic remote sensing, the surface scattered GNSS signal, is not tracked in the traditional sense. The typical bistatically scattered signal is diffusely radiated from a large area of the Earth´s surface, often covering tens of kilometers and thousands of hertz in Doppler as the observation geometry changes over the scattering surface, or glistening zone. Earth reflected signals have been detected from Ocean, land and ice surfaces repeatedly and shown to be linked to the surface conditions. This paper will concentrate on the design of the software receiver that was used to process actual ocean, land and ice reflection as received from the UK-DMC satellite experiment. It will address several unique processing techniques required for remote sensing, including the averaging necessary to mitigate the signal speckle noise and the generation of delay-Doppler maps of the signal over large scattering surface areas. The software receiver discussed will be provided to those interested, as well as example data sets, under an Open Source GPL.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2007) September 25 - 28, 2007 Fort Worth Convention Center Fort Worth, TX
Pages:	2742 - 2748
Cite this article:	Gleason, Scott, "An Open Source Software Receiver for Bistatic Remote Sensing," Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2007), Fort Worth, TX, September 2007, pp. 2742-2748.
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