A Design of LORAN Disciplined Oscillator

Abstract

This article presents the design of long range navigation (LORAN)-disciplined oscillator (LDO), employing the timing information of the LORAN system, which was developed as a backup system that corrects the vulnerability of the global positioning system (GPS)-based timing information utilization. The LDO designed on the basis of hardware generates a timing source synchronized with reference to the timing information of the LORAN-C receiver. As for the LDO-based timing information measurement, the Kalman filter was applied to estimate the measurement of which variance was minimized so that the stability performance could be improved. The oven-controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO) was employed as the local oscillator of the LDO. The controller was operated by digital proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controlling method. The LDO performance evaluation environment that takes into account the additional secondary factor (ASF) of the LORAN signals allows for the relative ASF observation and data collection using the coordinated universal time (UTC). The collected observation data are used to analyze the effect of ASF on propagation delay. The LDO stability performance was presented by the results of the LDO frequency measurements from which the ASF was excluded.