Tracking of High-Rate BOC Signals in an Urban Area

The reception and processing of Galileo's Public Regulated Service (PRS) imposes challenges to designers of appropriate acquisition and tracking techniques. For one, high bandwidths are required to sample and process this signal, and second, the PRS is encrypted which limits its access to authorized entities. Currently available prototype receivers for the PRS are classified when they contain the components necessary to acquire and track the PRS. Thus, they cannot simply be operated in outdoor areas with public access. To circumvent this issue we propose to recover the PRS chip sequence from a signal recording by a antenna with sufficient gain. Such a demodulation of the PRS chip sequence with a stationary high-gain antenna and this sequence's usage for tracking the PRS by a stationary omnidirectional antenna has been demonstrated before. In this paper we describe the development of a testbed to achieve acquisition and tracking of a real-world recorded PRS signal using the same demodulation method but in combination with a dynamic receiver mounted in a car. We qualitatively compare tracking results of the Bump Jump, the Astrium Correlator, and the Double Estimator techniques using the signal recorded by a front-end connected to the antenna which was mounted on a car's roof.