Determining scintillation effects on GPS receivers

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Abstract
Although formulae are available to determine tracking jitter (variance of the phase tracking error at the output of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems receiver phase‐locked loop) resulting from scintillation for GPS/SBAS C/A code processing and semicodeless GPS L1 and L2 Y‐code, these require input of the spectral parameters p (inverse power law of the phase power spectral density (PSD)) and T (spectral strength of the phase PSD at 1 Hz) which will not generally be available. It would certainly be more convenient if tracking jitter could be determined just from scintillation indices (S4 and σϕ) enabling determination when spectral parameters are not readily available and permitting tracking jitter for all the simultaneously observed satellites to be easily determined and used in a scintillation mitigation scheme. The main difficulty is that the Fresnel frequency, fF, which is an important feature of the amplitude PSD, should be known. Here a method is proposed which uses both scintillation indices (σϕ and S4) to give an additional relation to find both p and T. This makes use of the known general fading frequency behavior of the PSD spectrum which is different between amplitude and phase scintillation. This difference is exploited, utilizing approximate models of the PSD for both amplitude and phase, to define equations that can be solved for p and T for any given fF. Even when fF is not known, it is shown that by taking account of the range of physically realistic values of fF, the tracking jitter can generally be determined to a reasonable degree of accuracy.

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