Interference mitigated with CRP and dual-polarized antennas: Free webinar

Two new topic areas and presentations have been added to this Thursday’s free webinar on Signal Interference: Detection and Mitigation.

The speakers will explore anti-jamming protection with controlled radiation pattern antennas (CRPAs) and with dual-polarized antennas. The latter topic is also the cover story for the February issue, which demonstrated a significant improvement in positioning accuracy and robustness against interference with a dual-polarization approach: a gain in terms of C/N₀, particularly for low-elevation angle satellites and valuable in urban environments.

Headshot: Kirk Burnell

Kirk Burnell from NovAtel joins the Feb. 2 panel to present “How to deliver assured positioning, navigation and timing in GNSS-compromised environments.”

He will look at applications that stress the importance of high-reliability PNT. Compromised GNSS signals due to unintentional interference is of great concern, but intentional interference due to jamming is much more insidious.  Anti-jamming protection via controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA) technology is now available to a wide range of users.  A brief explanation of the technology will be followed by a few use-cases where CRPAs have been deployed in a variety of applications.

Burnell, Core Cards Product Manager for NovAtel, has worked at the company since 2015.  With an education in survey engineering, Kirk has been working with precision GNSS system designers and integrators in both support and product management capacities for more than 20 years.

Headshot: Matteo Sgammini

Matteo Sgammini  of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) will talk about work with dual-polarized antennas: the principles of operation of such an antenna array and how one performed in real-world jamming and non-jamming scenarios. This ION GNSS+ 2016 presentation became the cover story for GPS World’s February issue.

Innovation editor Richard Langley writes in his introduction to the February column, “All GNSS satellites transmit RHCP [right-hand circularly polarized] signals and therefore most GNSS receiving antennas are designed for such signals. However, a funny thing can happen to a satellite signal on the way to a receiving antenna. If the signal bounces off a nearby structure or the ground or the sea surface, its polarization is modified and it will become LHCP [left-hand circularly polarized] or a combination of the two polarizations.

“A primarily LHCP antenna can capture a significant portion of the energy in such a RHCP signal and could provide a strong response to a reflected signal when the line-of-sight signal is missing or very weak. So, there could be a benefit in having a dual-polarized antenna to improve positioning capability in marginal situations. Furthermore, jamming signals can be of arbitrary polarization and a dual-polarized antenna array with beamforming capability could better separate and mitigate such interference.”

February cover story. Photo: GNSS

Researchers at the DLR equipped a GNSS receiver with a diversely polarized antenna array to combine signal processing in the spatial and in the polarization domain. Tests show a significant improvement in receiver robustness against interference compared with the general single-polarization case.

The carrier-to-noise-density ratios of the line-of-sight components are improved since the receiver can use the power present on the left-hand circularly polarized channels, particularly for satellites with low elevation. Interference mitigation improves due to the possibility of filtering in the polarization domain and the additional number of available degrees of freedom.

Sgammini received a Masters degree in electrical engineering from the University of Perugia, Italy and now works at the Institute of Communications and Navigation, DLR.  He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering with research interests in interference mitigation techniques for GNSS. His research activity includes adaptive filtering, array signal processing and estimation theory for GNSS.

Sign up for  this Thursday’s free webinar here.

Webinar Summary:

As the number of GNSS signals being tracked increases, so does the potential for interference to dismiss the performance gains of using those additional signals.

To maximize performance and efficiency, prepared PNT users need their equipment to be able to detect when interference is present and mitigate it.

Developers, integrators and users need mitigation tools to protect and preserve GNSS measurement quality, maintaining high-quality multi-frequency multi-constellation positioning performance, even in challenging RF environments. This is essential particularly on the integration journey, especially during prototyping and when encountering unforeseen interference events in field testing, in order to produce fully successful integrated products.

The one-hour webinar also will include a follow-up Q&A session with the speakers. Burnell and Sgammini join Patrick Casiano of NovAtel and Rick Hamilton of CGSIC on the speaker panel. Casiano will present an Interference Toolkit that measures RF spectrum levels and allows the user to apply mitigation tools to protect and preserve GNSS measurement quality. Hamilton will explain the proliferation of jammers, aspects of illegal use, coordinated government response to interference events, and regulations to prohibit manufacture, import, export, sale and use of jammers.