Exclusion zones for GNSS signals when reconfiguring receiver hardware in the presence of narrowband RFI

  • Balaei, Asghar T. (Cooperative Research Center - Spatial Information) ;
  • Dempster, Andrew G. (School of Surveying & Spatial Information Systems at the University of New South Wales) ;
  • Barnes, Joel (Cooperative Research Center - Spatial Information)
  • Published : 2006.10.18

Abstract

Narrowband interference can severely degrade the performance of GPS receivers. Detecting the presence of interference and then characterizing it can lead to its removal. Receivers can be reconfigured to focus on other signals or satellites that are less vulnerable to that interference at that moment. Using hardware reconfigurability of FPGA receivers and characterizing the effect of narrowband interference on the GNSS signal quality lead us to a new RFI mitigation technique in which the highest quality and less vulnerable signal can be chosen at each moment. In the previous work [1], the post processing capability of a software GPS receiver, has been used to detect and characterize the CW interference. This is achieved by passing the GPS signal and the interference through the correlator. Then, using the conventional definition of C/No as the squared mean of the correlator output divided by its variance, the actual C/No for each satellite is calculated. In this work, first the 'Exclusion zone' for each satellite signal has been defined and then by using some experiments the effects of different parameters like signal power, jamming power and the environmental noise power on the Exclusion zone have been analyzed. By monitoring the Doppler frequency of each satellite and using the actual C/No of each satellite using the traditional definition of C/No and actual data from a software GPS receiver, the decision to reconfigure the receiver to other signal can be made.

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