Experimental Evaluation of GNSS-Reflectometry Altimetric Precision Using the P(Y) and C/A Signals

This work describes a novel dual-band Global Navigation Satellite Systems Reflectometer (GNSS-R) that uses the P(Y) and C/A signals scattered over the sea surface to perform highly precise altimetric measurements. The results derived from two different ground-based field experiments over a dam and over the sea under different surface's roughness conditions are presented. The analysis of the altimetric performance shows that the results obtained using the P(Y) code improve by a factor between 1.4 and 2.4 as compared to the results obtained using the C/A code, respectively, for high and mid-low satellite's elevation angles.