Applications of Satellite

Systems
Global Positioning System (GPS)
See
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_P
ositioning_System

History of GPS Systems

• United States GPS System

was designed and built and
is operated and maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense.
• It used to be known as the Navstar Global Positioning System and was first
brainstormed at the Pentagon in 1973.
• In 1978 the first operational GPS satellite was launched as a proof of concept. The
first satellite forming the current GPS constellation was launched in 1989, and the
24th satellite was launched in 1994.
• Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use, and the signal
available for civilian use was intentionally degraded (Selective Availability).
• The only method for civilian applications at the time to get high accuracy is by
using a method called differential GPS (DGPS) where civilian users would
receive a signal from an Earth station with a very well known position that
calculates the error in position and transmits error information to differential GPS
receivers.
• President Bill Clinton ordered Selective Availability to be turned off at midnight
May 1, 2000, improving the precision of civilian GPS from 100 meters to 10-
20 meters.
• Other satellite navigation systems in use at various states of development include:

• GLONASS – Russia's global navigation system

• Galileo – a global system being developed by the European Union and other partner
countries, planned to be operational by 2014
• Beidou – People's Republic of China's regional system, currently limited to Asia and
the West Pacific
 • COMPASS – People's Republic of China's global system, planned to be operational
by 2020
• IRNSS – India's regional navigation system, planned to be operational by 2012,
covering India and Northern Indian Ocean
• QZSS – Japanese regional system covering Asia and Oceania

US GPS Message Format

• Each GPS satellite continuously broadcasts a navigation message at 50 bps.
• Each complete message is composed of 30-second frames, with distinct groupings
of 1,500 bits of information.
• Each frame is further subdivided into 5 sub-frames of length 6 seconds and with
300 bits each.
• Each 30 second frame begins precisely on the minute or half minute as indicated
by the atomic clock on each satellite.
• The first part of the message encodes the week number and the time within the
week, as well as the data about the health of the satellite.
• The second part of the message, the ephemeris, provides the precise orbital
location of the transmitting satellite.
• The last part of the message, the almanac, contains coarse orbit and status
information for all satellites in the network as well as data related to error
correction.
• All satellites broadcast at the same frequencies.
• Signals are encoded using code division multiple access (CDMA) allowing
messages from individual satellites to be distinguished from each other based on
unique encodings for each satellite (that the receiver must be aware of).
• Two distinct types of CDMA encodings are used: the coarse/acquisition (C/A)
code, which is accessible by the general public, and the precise (P) code, that is
encrypted so that only the U.S. military can access it.
• The ephemeris data is extremely accurate data. GPS satellites get an update from
Earth stations every 2 hours and this update remains generally valid for 4 hours.
• The almanac is updated typically every 24 hours.

General Concept of GPS Systems

• Trilateration: The process by which a GPS receiver determines its location is called
Trilateration. In trilateration, the GPS receiver receives the exact location of several GPS
satellites by demodulating the messages sent by these satellites, which contain very
accurate positions of the different satellites. The GPS receiver also tries to find its
 distance to each of the satellites it is receiving from. A mechanism is added in the
transmitted data that would allow a GPS receiver to detect how far it is from each satellite
(or at least get a relative distance to the different satellites with respect to each other). By
doing some computations, the location of the GPS receiver is computed from knowing
the location of the different satellites and the distance each of the satellites.
• Number of Satellites for a fix: The process of trilateration requires solving several
simultaneous equations to find several variables. The variables that need to be solved are
the X-, Y-, Z-coordinates and the exact time. Since there are 4 variables that need to be
found, the GPS receiver needs 4 satellites to solve for them.
• When there are less than 3 satellites available: In this case, the GPS receiver cannot
find its location.
• When there are 3 satellites available: although there are 4 variables to need to be
evaluated, a GPS receiver that only receives from 3 satellites can find a good estimate of
the its location by assuming that it is on Earth’s surface. By doing this, it is reducing one
of the unknowns and therefore requiring only 3 satellites. However, if the location of the
GPS receiver is not close to Earth’s surface, a huge error in the computation may result.
• When there are 4 satellites available: this is the minimum number of satellites to get an
accurate location fix to find the location in 3D space.
• When there are more than 4 satellites available: In this case the GPS receiver will
solve for the 4 variables using more than 4 equations (over determined case). If the
computations from the equations do not exactly match (and usually they will not), the
GPS receiver will be able to get an average location fix resulting a more accurate location
computation. So, the more satellites a GPS receiver receives from, the better the location
computation will be.

How the US GPS Systems Work

• Each satellite is equipped with an atomic clock that allows it to keep extremely accurate
track of time.
• Each satellite computes its location very accurately and gets updates on its locations from
Earth stations every few hours.
• Each GPS satellite will send as part of the message it transmits a low bit-rate stream of
data that contains its exact location and the exact time.
• Before transmitting the data, the satellite uses a CDMA like spreading sequence to spread
the spectrum of the transmission over a large bandwidth on the order of 1 MHz
(compared to the bandwidth that the original data required few 10s of Hz). The spreading
sequences for different GPS satellites are different, and are orthogonal to each other,
meaning that the signal transmitted by one satellite can only be dispread (data is extracted
from it) using the same code.
• All Satellites transmit at the same frequency.
• Using a spreading code to dispread one of the transmissions will allow the GPS receiver
to dispread that corresponding transmission and all other transmissions of other GPS
satellites will appear as low power noise.
• Not only are the spreading codes orthogonal to each other but they are also orthogonal to
a delayed version of themselves. This means that if an attempt is made to dispread a
transmission using the correct code but that is not aligned to the spreading code, the
dispread data will appear as low power noise.
• Only if the correct spreading sequence is used and is time-aligned with the transmitter
spreading sequence then the data can be recovered, otherwise the dispread signals
becomes similar to a low-power noise signal. The alignment must be extremely accurate.
Even one chip period (the duration of a CDMA chip) of misalignment is sufficient to
completely destroy the dispread signal and make it appear as noise.
• The dispreading process is the computation of the correlation between two signals. The
two signals are multiplied and the product is integrated over the length of the spreading
sequence.
• When a GPS receiver is first turned on, it starts trying the spreading codes one by one.
The GPS receiver will try first spreading code 1. It will try to dispread the received signal
which may contain many signals from several GPS satellites. It checks the output of the
dispreading process. If the result is a large value, it will read the data which corresponds
to GPS satellite 1. If it finds that the result of dispreading process is low (similar to
noise), it will delay the dispreading code by one chip and try again. It will keep delaying
the dispreading code until a large correlation value is found. By the amount of delay, the
GPS receiver detects how far it is from that GPS satellite 1. If the GPS receiver tries all
delays and does not find a large correlation value for all delays, it concludes that GPS
satellite 1 is not visible.
• This process is repeated for all satellites until at least 4 GPS satellites are detected. Most
GPS receivers have the capability of receiving from 8 to 12 GPS satellites
simultaneously.
• The data received from different satellites containing their locations and the delays to
each of the satellites are used to compute the location of the GPS receiver using one of
many methods. The more GPS satellites from which the GPS receiver receives from, the
more accurate the location computation becomes.