A new Approach for Testing of Receivers with Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas

Abstract

Adaptive antennas with digital beamforming or other array signal processing methods offer advanced possibilities for suppression of multipath signals, jammers and interferers combined with an increased antenna gain. For development and testing of navigation receivers utilizing these techniques for improved signal reception, here summarized as receivers with controlled reception pattern antennas (CRPA), special GNSS signal generators are required in order to generate the signals as seen by each antenna element correctly in phase and amplitude. The paper describes a new GNSS satellite signal simulator especially developed for DLR by Spirent that is capable of generating individual GPS and Galileo satellite signals for testing of receivers with CRPA. The simulator will be combined and synchronized with an additional hardware matrix developed by DLR, which produces a planar wavefront, i.e. the signals seen by each element of an antenna array depending on the direction of arrival of individual satellite signals. The features of the new satellite signal generator, the principals of signal generation, the theoretical background for wave front generation, the synchronization between the satellite signal simulator and the matrix subsystem, and finally, the application of the complete simulation system for receiver and antenna testing are presented.