#Software for digital satellite receiver software#

The digitized signal is provided at the output of the front end in a convenient format, which, for processing signals on a PC, is typically USB 2.0 with its maximum signaling rate of 480 megabits per second.

#Software for digital satellite receiver software#

Therefore, the front end of a real software GNSS receiver includes a low-noise preamplifier, filters, and one or more downconverters to produce an analog intermediate-frequency signal that passes to a high-speed ADC. Now, we canвЂ™t simply connect an ADC to an antenna since the strength of GNSS signals falls well below the sensitivity threshold of real ADCs and those that can directly digitize microwave radio frequencies are rather power hungry. Such a GNSS receiver is an example of a software-defined radio - a radio-communications architecture in which as much of the operation of a receiver (or a transmitter) as feasible is performed by software in an embedded system or on a personal computer (PC). There are certain technological limitations that currently preclude fully developing such a device but we are getting very close to the ideal and practical implementations already exist. WHAT IS THE IDEAL GNSS RECEIVER? Well, that depends on what you mean by вЂњideal.вЂќ If we take it to mean the simplest, conceptually, yet the most capable and adaptable receiver, then we would just connect an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to an antenna and pass the converterвЂ™s output to a digital signal processor whose software would transform the received signal into the desired result with the utmost speed and precision.