Evaluation and Calibration of GNSS Receivers for Ionospheric Delay and Scintillation Measurements

R. Orus-Perez, R. Prieto-Cerdeira

Abstract:	Several GNSS-ground-based Ionospheric Monitoring networks has been and will continue to be deployed including scintillation monitors from different manufacturers and characteristics. Those heterogeneous networks implicitly require the verification of the effect of each receiver in the measured data, and the confirmation that data from different receivers can combined without any inter-receiver calibration required, otherwise scientific results combining data from different receivers would be of limited value. In order to do that, one possibility is to co-locate receivers in scintillation areas sharing the same antenna and analyse the results. Other simpler option is to generate modelled synthetic scintillation time-series and then apply the scintillation effect to an RF signal generator. The later is the approach followed in this paper. The comparison of performance from two commercial scintillation monitors is analysed using synthetic time-series generated with GISM scintillation model. Those time-series affect RF simulated GNSS signals through a Spirent Radio Frequency Constellation Simulator. In this sense, the performance of the different receivers over the reference values computed with the models is evaluated jointly with the behaviour of the receiver tracking loop for different scintillations events that ranges from S4=0.1 to S4=0.9. Also the difference between time-series from GISM and Cornell scintillation models, the performance for different signals (GPS L1 and L2C and Galileo E1 and E5a are included in the analysis) and the effect of changing the PLL loop bandwidth are also presented. Due to the increasing number of scintillation monitoring networks, scintillation monitor manufacturers, GNSS signals and systems, a receiver independent format for scintillation data exchange, named SCINTEX, in line of other exchange formats like RINEX is proposed.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 24th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2011) September 20 - 23, 2011 Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon Portland, OR
Pages:	626 - 633
Cite this article:	Orus-Perez, R., Prieto-Cerdeira, R., "Evaluation and Calibration of GNSS Receivers for Ionospheric Delay and Scintillation Measurements," Proceedings of the 24th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2011), Portland, OR, September 2011, pp. 626-633.
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