Investigating GNSS Multipath in Aeronautic Applications Through Antenna Installed Performance

Abstract

Satellite navigation is a fundamental asset in today’s mobile platforms to determine position, velocity and time. In mobile applications, however, the available footprint to place the navigation antenna is often chosen a priori, taking into consideration mechanical/esthetic reasons. This leads often to not-optimal placement, causing multipath and hence impacting on the achievable performance of the antenna and therefore on the achievable navigation accuracy. Proper knowledge of the antenna performance once installed on the platform is therefore of paramount importance to achieve high-precision navigation: methods and tools to assess such performance will be discussed in this work. It will be shown how to characterize the performance in a fully simulative way and then also in a hybrid way, combining anechoic chamber measurement of the antenna with simulation of the platform. It will be shown that, through installed performance analysis, information about the multipath-induced pseudorange error can be obtained. Finally, the parameters that mostly influence the change of antenna performance once mounted on a platform will be discussed.