Evaluating the Suitability of Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software Radio Peripheral Front-Ends for High-Fidelity Satnav Monitoring Applications

Abstract Signal quality monitoring is an essential portion of the Global Positioning System (GPS) enterprise. Through monitoring, accuracy and normality are achieved for each satellite and signal. GPS users rely on this information from monitoring stations to ensure safe and successful operation. Traditional monitoring has been performed with hardware receivers or custom radio frequency front-ends. These receivers have known and measured impacts on the distortions of the received signal. This research aims to elucidate and quantify the amount of distortion introduced by the front-ends of general-purpose commercial off-the-shelf software-defined radio (SDR) peripherals. Monitoring stations outfitted with SDRs are more flexible and cheaper than those without SDRs and can quickly adapt to newly launched or reconfigured navigation satellites. This research quantifies the amount of signal distortions introduced by a handful of SDR front-ends when subjected to consistent navigation signals from a high-quality simulator.