Performance Consideration in Signal Acquisition for High Dynamic Application in Tropical Environment

The signal acquisition stage in GNSS receiver is considered the first step in the baseband processing after the signal has been down-converted by the front end. The signal components consist of a spreading code, residual carrier frequency that has been down-converted to an intermediate frequency and a navigation data. Acquisition phase aim is to coarsely estimate the code delay that shifted due to propagation delay and the carrier frequency that has been heavily influenced by Doppler. Many high-dynamic environment focus on the urban area but this work shifted the interest in highly tropical environment. The high dynamic application such as UAV will face an enormous problem in trying to acquire the signal especially when it is used in a harsh environment such as under the canopy of heavy tropical environment. An in-house synthetic raw signal is generated and the receiver processing using different acquisition strategy is being implemented using MATLAB®. This paper evaluate the performance of serial and parallel acquisition techniques for simulated GPS L1 signal under the assumption of harsh tropical environment and further proposed the performance consideration when dealing with such condition.