Citation
Abstract
This article reports on a set of laboratory tests of telemetry ranging conducted at Development Test Facility 21 (DTF-21) in Monrovia, California. An uplink pseudorandom noise (PN) ranging signal was generated by DTF-21, acquired by the Frontier Radio designed and built at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and downlink telemetry frames from the radio were recorded by an openloop receiver. In four of the tests, the data indicate that telemetry ranging can resolve the two-way time delay to a standard deviation of 2.1 - 3.4 ns, corresponding to about 30 to 51 cm in (one-way) range accuracy, when 30 s averaging of timing estimates is used. Other tests performed worse because of unsatisfactory receiver sampling rate, quantizer resolution, dc bias, improper configuration, or other reasons. The article also presents an analysis of the expected end-to-end performance of the telemetry ranging system. In one case considered, the theoretically-predicted performance matches the test results, within 10%, which provides a reasonable validation that the expected performance was achieved by the test. The analysis also shows that in one typical ranging scenario, one-way range accuracy of 1 m can be achieved with telemetry ranging when the data rate is above 2 kbps.
Details
- Volume
- 42-206
- Published
- August 15, 2016
- Pages
- 1–35
- File Size
- 4.0 MB