GNSS-R Aircraft Flight Test Based on Digital Beam Forming

Abstract

The technology can be used to measure the wind and the height of the sea based on the GNSS-R, It can be complementary to the other advantages of sea measurements, has more advantages than other methods when it can be used to constitute constellation. When to deal with the environments of the sea surface, only need is to install the receiver, so compared to traditional means of remote sensing, GNSS-R technology reduce costs, weight, and the power, at the same time, the technology can improve the resolution and accuracy, It can be used to the new way at remote sensing. This paper designs a new GNSS-R receiver based on the Digital beam forming (DBF), the receiver through the dbf to synthesis the receive signal. The receiver has 31 dbf channels, so it can complete the synthesis a plurality of different direction’s signal at the same time. In order to effectively improve the detection area, the receiver can achieve the angle scanning between the fixed angle and the dynamic angle. In order to test the receiver, we did an experiment by using the plane on November 3, 2015 at Bohai Bay, flying height about 1200 meters, in the experiment, we successfully captured the reflected signals at the high altitude (1.2 km) dynamic scenes, after that we got the delay-doppler mapping through to deal with the reflected signals. By calculating the phase difference between the reflection channel’s DDM and direct access, we got the high information of the receiver, after that we compared the high information that can be got through the receiver, the answer showed that the deviation is less than 4 m.