Garbin, Esteban ; Krystek, Piotr ; Piriz, Ricardo ; Waller, Pierre ; Defraigne, Pascale ; Bertrand, Bruno

published in Proceedings of the 31st International Technical Meeting of The Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2018), pp. 2796 - 2803 (2018)

Abstract: Absolute calibration procedures have been carried out for many years now, but they have only been focused on GPS signals used by the timing laboratories. In the framework of the “Accurate calibration of multi-system/multifrequency GNSS receiver chain” (AKAL) project, new procedure for calibration of Galileo, GPS and GLONASS signals have been put in place at the ESA Technology center ESTEC in The Netherlands. During the development of the absolute procedures, multiple effects have been considered which have not been previously reported in the literature, especially to identify additional elements that might affect the overall estimated uncertainty. In this paper, we present the results of the validation of this absolute calibration procedure, based on the use of real GNSS signals collected by different stations in different setups. The Validation activities were led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium and consisted in the installation in common clock and travelling of the reference receiver to different Group 1/Group 2 laboratories. The results show some discrepancies between stations in some of the signals, and possible explanations are presented by the authors. The general agreement with relatively calibrated stations from BIPM laboratories has a one nanosecond bias, which is deemed as very good, considering that the absolute calibration of the BIPM reference receiver was done almost 15 years ago.

DOI: 10.33012/2018.16108
Links: link
Funding: Accurate calibration of multi-system/multifrequency GNSS receiver chain” (AKAL) project/multifrequency GNSS receiver chain” (AKAL) project