Blind Doppler Tracking and Positioning with NOAA LEO Satellite Signals

Abstract

A spectral approach for blind acquisition and Doppler tracking of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite signals is applied to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. The approach accounts for the high LEO satellites’ dynamic channel, by deriving an appropriate model for the received signal frequency spectrum. A frequency-domain-based Doppler discriminator is utilized along with a Kalman filter-based Doppler tracking algorithm. Experimental results are presented showing successful acquisition and Doppler tracking of NOAA LEO satellite signals. Next, the approach is demonstrated in multi-constellation LEO acquisition and tracking, showing Hz-level Doppler tracking of 4 Starlink, 2 OneWeb, 1 Iridium NEXT, 1 Orbcomm, and 1 NOAA LEO satellites. Carrier phase observables were constructed from the tracked Doppler and fused through a nonlinear least-squares estimator to localize a stationary receiver. Starting with an initial estimate 3,600 km away from the receiver’s true position, the proposed approach is shown to achieve a two-dimensional (2D) error of 5.1 m.