Direct Signal Enhanced Semicodeless Processing of GNSS Surface-Reflected Signals

This paper presents an aircraft demonstration of direct-signal enhanced semicodeless processing of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals reflected from the Earth’s surface. Comparisons are made between this new method and an interferometric approach to GNSS reflectometry. Results show that this technique produces waveforms with greater signal-to-noise compared with the interferometric approach for all GNSS signals currently in use or planned for the near future. Alternatively, the semicodeless technique can have similar performance with smaller antennas for lower hardware costs. The semicodeless approach also has the advantage that different signals along with their different surface spatial resolutions are processed separately, each signal’s coherent integration time can be optimized, and ground/aircraft experiments and tests are free of spurious signals. The signal processing demands of the semicodeless approach are shown to be proportional to the number of signal components processed when integrated with a GNSS precise orbit determination (POD) receiver.