Characterization of the effects of CW and pulse CW interference on the GPS signal quality

In the Global Positioning System (GPS), code division multiple access (CDMA) signals are used. Because of the spectral characteristics of the CDMA signal, each particular type of interference (signals to be rejected) has a different effect on the quality of the received GPS satellite signals. In this paper, the effects of three types of interference are studied on the carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N0) of the received GPS signal as an indicator of the quality of that signal; continuous wave (CW) and pulse CW. For CW interference, it is analytically shown that the C/N0 of the signal can be calculated using a closed formula after the correlator in the receiver. This result is supported by calculating the C/N0 using the I and Q data from a software GPS receiver. For pulsed CW, a similar analysis is performed to characterize the effect of parameters such as pulse repetition period (PRP) and also duty cycle on the received signal quality. It is specifically shown that for equal interference power levels, in the cases where the PRP is far less than the pseudorandom noise code period, the signal degradation increases with increasing the duty cycle whereas it doesn’t change when the two periods are equal or the PRP is far bigger than the code period.