Influence of GPS code tracking on multipath performance

Influence of GPS code tracking on multipath performance. It is well known that carrier-phase multipath is one of the limiting error sources in high-precision differential GPS applications. A thorough understanding of carrier-phase multipath is the first step in the course of mitigating its impact in high precision applications. Complete characterization of carrier-phase multipath error requires a fundamental theoretical description and mathematical modeling. However, the theory and models must be validated against real data. The purposes of This work are to study the influence of GPS receiver code tracking architecture on the carrier-phase multipath error, and to provide a thorough validation of carrier-phase multipath theory. Previous research published by the authors has served to validate carrier-phase multipath theory against bench test data, which was collected using wide (1.0 chip spacing) and narrow (0.1 chip spacing) correlator spacing for the case of the non-coherent code tracking architecture (Kalyanaraman and Braasch, 2003). Prior to (Kalyanaraman and Braasch, 2003) scant attention has been given to validating carrier-phase multipath theory against GPS data (Townsend et al., 1995). Current research efforts will validate carrier-phase multipath theory for wide and narrow correlator spacing within coherent code tracking architectures by comparing bench test data to theoretical predictions. In addition, data has been collected for nonzero multipath phase rates.