A Comparative Analysis of Polar and Equatorial Scintillation Effects on GPS L1 and L5 Tracking Loops

This paper addresses a comparative analysis of both amplitude and phase scintillation effects on the carrier tracking stages processing GPS L1 C/A, L5-data and L5-pilot signals. Robust architectures that are optimized to operate in a harsh ionospheric environment are considered. Traditional Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) and Kalman filter based-PLL carrier tracking algorithms have been employed and the performance of the methods have been evaluated and compared in terms of the standard deviation of Doppler estimation, phase error, phase lock indicator (PLI) and phase jitter. The comparison considers different parameter settings of the loop filters, and the performance assessment is done exploiting a fully software GNSS receiver. This study is based on real GNSS signals affected by significant phase and amplitude scintillation effects, collected at the South African Antarctic research base SANAE IV and Brazilian Centro de Radioastronomia e Astrofísica Mackenzie (CRAAM) monitoring station.