Effects of earthquake ground motion on tracking characteristics of new Global Navigation Satellite System receivers

We use a shake table capable of large (7 G) three-dimensional accelerations with large payloads to simulate ground motion reconstructed from acceleration data collected during the February 2010 Mw = 8.8 Maule, Chile, earthquake. The tracking performance of five modern geodetic GNSS receiver and antenna combinations was investigated while undergoing simulated seismic shaking at three two levels of amplification. Individual system performance was characterized by the number of tracked GNSS observations. The L1 and L2 GPS signal tracking was significantly impacted for the majority of the receiver models during simulations with maximum accelerations of 4 G, and the tracking performance for all of the tested receiver types was significantly impaired during the 7 G simulations. Results show improved tracking when only the antenna was shaken suggesting that vibration-induced oscillator phase noise may contribute significantly to tracking degradation during shaking.