GNSS-R software receiver and its preliminary experimental results

A Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) software receiver and its preliminary experimental results are presented in this paper. The antenna system, the radio frequency analog front-end, and the digital signal processing unit of this receiver are described in detail. With this software receiver, various algorithms and theoretical models can be verified for different remote sensing applications. Furthermore, preliminary experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of this receiver. The experimental results demonstrate that the Global Position System (GPS) satellites can be correctly acquired and tracked with this receiver, and that the calculated location parameters of the receiver, when four GPS satellites are tracked, are consistent with those provided by the Google map. In addition, when this receiver is used for the soil moisture retrieval, a measure error of about 5.79% can be achieved when compared with the measure results given by the soil moisture meter.