Course 335: Military GPS Receiver Performance in Jamming, with Mitigations (U.S. Military Only)

Day 1 Morning

Introduction (1 hour)
GPS, satnav, and other current and prospective sources of position, velocity, and time, with their strengths and limitations. Shows why GPS and satnav will remain essential for decades to come.

Satnav and GPS Fundamentals (2 hours)

• Basics of how satnav works. Construction of signals, receiver functions, jamming and spoofing, positioning and timing errors, GPS details including differences between civil and military signals, overview of foreign satnav systems.
  

Day 1 Afternoon

Military Signals and Receivers (1 hour)

• Frequency bands, overview of P(Y) and M signals, binary offset carrier (BOC) spreading modulations, types of military receivers, receiver operating states, channel states.

Decibels (0.5 hours)

• Refresher on decibels, dBW, dBm. Rules of thumb, examples, and tricks in using decibels for engineering calculations. Practical examples.

Receiver Performance Measures (1.5 hour)

• Effective C/N₀, spectral separation coefficients (SSCs), J/S, E_b/N₀, tolerable jamming power (TJP). What they mean, why they are important, how they are interrelated, how they are used, with practical examples.

Day 2 Morning

Review Questions (1 hour)

• Discussion of previous day’s material based on review questions that are solved and used as a springboard for further explanation and discussion.

Antennas (1 hour)

• Antenna basics (gain, polarization, …), fixed reception pattern antenna (FRPA) characteristics, FRPA types, antenna arrays—controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA) characteristics, adaptive antijam antenna system processing architectures (single-tap power minimization, SFAP and STAP power minimization, constrained SFAP and STAP), advantages and disadvantages of different architectures, stresses on architectures.

Acquisition and Initial Synch (1 hour)

• Initial receiver states; initial time uncertainty and initial frequency uncertainty; time-frequency space, tiles, and cells; receiver processing overview; cross ambiguity functions, coherent and non-coherent processing; other functions in acquisition; representative acquisition thresholds.

Day 2 Afternoon

Tracking and Data Demodulation (1 hour)

• Concept of tracking received signal parameters, concept of tracking loops, tracking loop considerations, carrier tracking (S-curve, loss of lock, performance), code tracking (S-curve, loss of lock, performance), data message demodulation, inertial measurement units in tracking (loose coupling, tight coupling, vector tracking, ultratight coupling), calculating jamming thresholds.

Concepts of Jamming and Mitigations (0.5 hours)

• Types of jamming waveforms in time, frequency, and amplitude domains. Types of jamming mitigations.

Situational Awareness (0.5 hours)

• Concepts and candidate architectures.

Link Budgets and Propagation Loss (1 hour)

• Space to earth link budgets, radio line of sight, terrestrial link budgets, effects of foliage and buildings.

Day 3 Morning

Review Questions (1 hour)

• Discussion of previous day’s material based on review questions that are solved and used as a springboard for further explanation and discussion.

End to End Examples (1.5 hours)

• Putting all the pieces together with practical “toy examples” that integrate everything over the past two days including planning tests, comparing user equipment, understanding benefits of M-signal.

Wrap-up (0.5 hour) Review Questions

• Revisiting the key points of the past 15 hours of class, putting the material in context.