2017
Ref: SCART-2019-0072

Study of the GPS inter-frequency calibration of timing receivers

Defraigne, Pascale ; Huang, Wei ; Bertrand, Bruno ; Rovera, Daniele G.


published in Metrologia, 55 issue 1, pp. 11-19 (2017)

Abstract: When calibrating Global Positioning System (GPS) stations dedicated to timing, the hardware delays of P1 and P2, the P(Y)-codes on frequencies L1 and L2, are determined separately. In the international atomic time (TAI) network the GPS stations of the time laboratories are calibrated relatively against reference stations. This paper aims at determining the consistency between the P1 and P2 hardware delays (called dP1 and dP2) of these reference stations, and to look at the stability of the inter-signal hardware delays dP1–dP2 of all the stations in the network. The method consists of determining the dP1–dP2 directly from the GPS pseudorange measurements corrected for the frequency-dependent antenna phase center and the frequency-dependent ionosphere corrections, and then to compare these computed dP1–dP2 to the calibrated values. Our results show that the differences between the computed and calibrated dP1–dP2 are well inside the expected combined uncertainty of the two quantities. Furthermore, the consistency between the calibrated time transfer solution obtained from either single-frequency P1 or dual-frequency P3 for reference laboratories is shown to be about 1.0 ns, well inside the 2.1 ns uB uncertainty of a time transfer link based on GPS P3 or Precise Point Positioning. This demonstrates the good consistency between the P1 and P2 hardware delays of the reference stations used for calibration in the TAI network. The long-term stability of the inter-signal hardware delays is also analysed from the computed dP1–dP2. It is shown that only variations larger than 2 ns can be detected for a particular station, while variations of 200 ps can be detected when differentiating the results between two stations. Finally, we also show that in the differential calibration process as used in the TAI network, using the same antenna phase center or using different positions for L1 and L2 signals gives maximum differences of 200 ps on the hardware delays of the separate codes P1 and P2; however, the final impact on the P3 combination is less than 10 ps.

DOI: 10.1088/1681-7575/aa9b5b
Links: link


The record appears in these collections:
Royal Observatory of Belgium > Reference Systems & Planetology
Science Articles > Peer Reviewed Articles



 Record created 2019-01-28, last modified 2019-01-28