High-Sensitivity Military GPS Receivers

Many military users need to operate in areas where GPS signal reception is impeded by building walls, dense foliage and urban canyon. Current military GPS receivers do not operate robustly in these environments which include multipath and varying signal levels caused by partial blockage/non-penetration of signals through different materials. Some vendors in the commercial sector, however, have been fielding so-called “High-Sensitivity Receivers” that can track GPS signals 30 dB below conventional civilian/military GPS receivers allowing operation in environments where GPS satellites are blocked or severely attenuated. The objective of this Phase I SBIR effort is to design, develop, simulate, implement, and test GPS receiver software algorithms that provide significant “high-sensitivity” signal tracking performance over conventional military GPS receivers. We propose to achieve this through the development of an innovative multipath mitigating, high sensitivity tracking algorithm that can be implemented as an add-on to a SAASM receiver. Under Phase I we shall develop this algorithm design and conduct analysis and simulation to demonstrate the feasibility, technological challenges, advantages, and disadvantages of our proposed approach. We shall also develop a design for a Phase II prototype receiver and assess potential military users who could benefit from a high sensitivity military GPS receiver.