Signal acquisition is a process of a rough estimation of partial code delay and pseudo-Doppler frequency to provide a bootstrap for the tracking loops. In the modern software-defined receivers there’s a designated hardware/software block called the Fast Search Engine (FSE) that is used to speed up the initialization of the receiver in the case of a cold start.
GNSS jamming is something I’m very familiar with and with what I’ve been involved in for most of my career. My specialist’s thesis (6-year degree, Russian alternative to bachelor and master combined) was about real-time narrowband interference mitigation for GNSS receivers with FIR-filters, I wrote several papers about that and, eventually, I became a scientific supervisor of the big antijamming and antispoofing project. In that project, I and my team have investigated various approaches for spatial (digital CRPA) and non-spatial interference and spoofing mitigation. Then we implemented them with MATLAB models and built some test benches with real hardware to test the models and algorithms with real-world data. And we’ve even designed and implemented antispoofing and CRPA antijamming receivers as working prototypes, operating in real-time! As you already guessed, this is the topic I’m very comfortable with and could talk about for hours, but I’ll try to keep it brief and concentrated.
In this series of articles I’d like to share my experience in GNSS receiver design over the last 10+ years. Writing down the knowledge on various topics is an excellent way to share the information, as well as structuring and preparing this kind of educational material allows one to find the missing pieces in one’s knowledge.
It is extremely useful to have a little vacation every once in a while, to distract yourself from your day-to-day basis. You may find yourself thinking about various tasks you were too busy to give some serious time to. One of such tasks I was intrigued about is the guitar cabinet simulation via the impulse responses of the real cabinet-microphone pair.