Developing a Multi-Frequency for GNSS-Based Scintillation Monitoring Receiver

The design, development and deployment of a multi-frequency scintillation-monitoring GNSS receiver is presented in this paper. To provide a large degree of flexibility and reconfigurability, the receiver is comprised of a custom quad-channel front-end, a software-defined receiver and post-processor utility. This configuration enables raw IF data capture, near-real-time or post-mission processing, and event identification for dataset archiving. The performance of this final design is benchmarked against a set of commercial atmospheric monitoring receives, using datasets recorded at both equatorial and high-latitude sites. Focusing on the availability and consistency of intensity and phase scintillation metrics, namely sigma(phi) and S-4, results demonstrate comparable performance both in the absence and presence of exhibiting high ionospheric scintillation.