Proposal of GNSS satellite antenna performance evaluation based on reconstructed gain patterns

Abstract

The evaluation of available power at user location is an important task as part of a navigation signal quality verification. This is particularly important for safety critical applications using signals from the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Due to a variety of factors, the performance of GNSS satellite antennas may exhibit a non-nominal performance. Efforts to characterize gain patterns of such antennas have been conducted in the past using complex observation setups. In this contribution, GNSS antenna gain patterns are reconstructed using observations from a simple measurement setup. Reconstructed patterns have been used for a characterization of performance of GNSS satellites antennas. The results may prove to be useful for safety critical and domain-specific applications, such as GNSS reflectometry.