GPS Signal Tracking on Spinning Vehicles with Antenna Diversity Techniques

T. Ebinuma, H. Saito, K. Tanaka, T. Miyoshi

Abstract:	This paper describes the design and development of a dedicated GPS receiver for spin stabilized launch vehicles. In order to keep tracking a sufficient number of GPS signals even during the spinning motion, we use multiple GPS patch antennas and space them equally apart each other around the cylindrical launcher body. A new signal combining scheme was developed to avoid deep fading in antenna gain pattern. This technique requires phase control to keep the signals received on multiple antennas in phase with each other. A dual-antenna software GPS receiver was developed to evaluate the proposed signal combining algorithm. The result showed that the proposed algorithm was capable providing stable and continuous signal tracking under a high-rate spinning motion while simple RF combining through a power combiner was failed.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009) September 22 - 25, 2009 Savannah International Convention Center Savannah, GA
Pages:	1413 - 1418
Cite this article:	Ebinuma, T., Saito, H., Tanaka, K., Miyoshi, T., "GPS Signal Tracking on Spinning Vehicles with Antenna Diversity Techniques," Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009), Savannah, GA, September 2009, pp. 1413-1418.
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