Multi-antenna snapshot receiver

A global navigation satellite system (GNSS) snap-shot receiver records a segment of data and then sends it to a server for processing. The server then sends information, regarding the position and time for the receiver, back. This technology enables low-power positioning and can also be used for remote processing of encrypted signals. A multi-antenna receiver benefits from increased spatial diversity, as beamforming and nullsteering can be implemented. Both these technologies improve receiver robustness against interferences, multi-path effects and spoofing. A snapshot receiver with a six-element antenna array is presented. Data is captured with a multi-channel recorder, from which snapshots are extracted and processed. GNSS acquisition algorithms which use the channels coherently, incoherently, and a mixture of both (first estimate the steering-weights and then to combine coherently), are evaluated and will be presented. The results are compared to a single channel snapshot, which has an equal snapshot data-size. Results show that with small snapshots, a single channel has superior performance. However, with larger snapshots similar performance is achieved, as what is theoretically expected.