Yo Michael! On Tue, 16 Jul 2019 08:53:49 +0100 "Michael J. Tubby B.Sc. MIET" <address@hidden> wrote:While it is true that several GPS receivers work without needing the system Almanac, you have to be careful as strange things can happen since the Almanac contains the SV Operational Health for each of the SV/RPNs.Yes, there are a few tidbits in the almanac not present elsewhere. Sat health is not one of them as each sat broadcasts that in its ephermeis.Remember that SVN23/PRN23 had a failure of its onboard atomic clock back in Feb 2016 and that any GPS receiver using it in its navigation solution was off by around 13.7uS ... this threw out GPS receivers using it in the position solution by a mile or two. We had hundreds of emergency services vehicles in the south-west of England in the wrong location for several hours until SVN23 was marked bad.Yes, because the receiver failed to check the health status in the ephmeris.
No, the SV said it was 'healthy' but was wrong ... they fixed it by marking it bad in the system almanac, at least that's what the NavCen NANU said.
While starting up without the system almanac is common place these days it is optimistic since it assumes that every SVN that you acquire lock to is behaving and there is a chance that one or more is not - there's also increased chance of trusting a spoofed signal... I know, I tried ... its amazing what you can do with a HackRF-One, Rubidium frequency standard borrowed from a friend and Linux GPSSIM software.Before you can use a sat for a fix you need to get lock, then download the ephemeris. If the receiver forgets to check the health bit in the ephermeis then you bought a crappy receiver.
Sure, but there's the issue of does the SV police itself and the answer is "not always". SVN23 went rogue but said it was good, hence it got trusted in position solutions which is why the ground station had to mark it bad in the Almanac.
Spoofing is a much more complex issue. To handle that you need a really new receiver that knows how to check for that. If you look at the u-blox AED doc they are very clear to say their spoofing detection is not to be trusted.
Sure, it doesn't guarantee to be right, i.e. it may not detect all spoofing - from our testing:
a) when presented with a constellation which has a mixture of mainly genuine SVs plus one or two 'bad actors' it usually gets it right
b) when completely hidden from the real constellation [Faraday cage] and presented with signals from HackRF+Linux+GPSSIM it is easily fooled *if* your RefClock (into HackRF) is of good quality
RGDS GARY --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary E. Miller Rellim 109 NW Wilmington Ave., Suite E, Bend, OR 97703 address@hidden Tel:+1 541 382 8588 Veritas liberabit vos. -- Quid est veritas? "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it." - Lord Kelvin
Michael J Tubby B.Sc. (Hons) MIET
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