1-sec Carrier Phase (again)

 A comment challenged my video  .  I’m glad it included an acknowledgment that some points might have been missed. To be frank that happened a bunch; bear with me while I explain. First, there’s the accuracy issue; doppler &/or deltarange info provided from many receivers is far less accurate than carrier phase (sometimes due to cutting corners in implementation — recall that carrier phase, as the integral of doppler, will be smoother i f  processing is done carefully). Next, preference for 20-msec intervals will backfire badly. If phase noise at L-band gives a respectable 7mm = 0.7cm, doppler velocity error [(current phase) – (previous phase)] / 1 sec is (1.414) (0.7) = 1 cm/sec RMS for a 1-sec sequential differencing interval.  Now use 20 msec: FIFTY times as much doppler error! Alternatively if division is implicit instead of overt, degradation is more complicated: sequential phase differences are highly correlated (with a correlation coefficient of -1/2, to be precise). That’s because the difference (current phase) – (previous phase) and the difference (next phase) – (current phase) both contain the common value of current phase. In a modern estimation algorithm, observations with sequentially correlated errors are far more difficult to process optimally.  That topic is a very deep one; Section 5.6 and Addendum 5.B of my 2007 book address it thoroughly. I’m not expecting everyone to go through all that but, to offer fortification for its credibility, let me cite a few items:

* agreement from other designers who abandoned efforts to use short intervals
* table near the bottom of a page on this site.

* phase residual plots from Chapter 8 of my 2007 book.

The latter two, it is recalled, came from flight test for an extended duration (until flight recorder was full), under severe test aircraft (DC-3) vibration.

For doppler updating from sources other than satnav, my point is stronger still. Doppler from radar (which lacks the advantage of passive operation) won’t get velocity error much below a meter/sec — and even that is an improvement over unaided inertial nav (we won’t see INS velocity specs expressed in cm/sec within our lifetime).

Additional advantages of what the video offers include (a) no requirement for a mask angle, (b) GNSS interoperability, and (c) robustness. A brief explanation:

(1) Virtually the whole world discards all measurements from low-elevation satellites because of propagation errors. But ionospheric and tropospheric effects change very little over a second; 1-sec phase differences are great for velocity information. Furthermore they offer a major geometry advantage while occurrence of multipath would stick out like a sore thumb, easily edited out .
(2) 1-sec differences from various constellations are much easier to mix than the phases themselves. 
(3) For receivers exploiting FFT capability  even short fragments of data, not sufficiently continuous for conventional mechanizations (track loops), are made available for discrete updates.
The whole “big picture” is a major improvement is robust operation

The challenger isn’t the only one who missed these points; much of our industry, in fact, is missing the boat in crucial areas. Again I understand skepticism, but consider the “conventional wisdom” regarding ADSB: Velocity errors expressed in meters per second — you can hear speculative values as high as ten . GRADE SCHOOL ARITHMETIC shows how scary that is; collision avoidance extrapolates ahead. Consider the vast error volume resulting from doing that 90 seconds ahead of closest approach time with several meters per second of velocity error. So — rely on see-and-avoid? There are beaucoup videos that show how futile that is (and many more videos that show how often near misses occur — in addition there are about a thousand runway incursions each year). That justifies the effort for dramatic reduction of errors in tracking dynamics — to cm/sec relative velocity accuracy.

It’s perfectly logical for people to question my claims if they seem too good to be true. All I ask is follow through, with visits to URLs cited here.