Quality Assessment of GPS L2C Signals and Measurements

A series of numerical experiments with measurements observed at continuously operating reference stations (CORS) of the international GNSS services (IGS) and the national geographical information institute of Korea (NGII) have been intensively carried out to evaluate the quality of pseudo-ranges and carrier-phases of GPS L2C signal obtained by various receiver types, benign and harsh operational environment. In this analysis, some quality measures, such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the magnitude of multipath, and the number of cycle slips, the pseudo-range and carrier phase obtaining rate were computed and compared. The SNR analysis revealed an impressive result that the trend in the SNR of C/A and the L2C comparably depends upon type of receivers. The result of multipath analysis also showed clearly different tendency depending on the receiver types. The reason for this inconsistent tendency was seemed to be that the different multipath mitigation algorithm built-in each receiver. The number of L2C cycle slip was less than P2(Y), and L2C measurements obtaining rate was higher than that of P2(Y) in three receiver types. In the harsh observational environment, L2C quality was not only superior to P2(Y) in all aspects such as SNR, multipath magnitude, the number of cycle slips, and measurement obtaining rate, but also it could maintain a level of quality equivalent to C/A. According to the results of this analysis, it's expected that improved positioning performance like accuracy and continuity can be got through the use of L2C instead of existing P2(Y).