Effect of broadcast and precise ephemerides on estimates of the frequency stability of GPS Navstar clocks

Abstract

AbstractFrequency stability analysis of on‐orbit Navstar clocks is performed by the Naval Research Laboratory using both the broadcast and the precise post‐processed ephemerides. The phase offset between the Navstar clock and the reference clock is computed from pseudorange measurements obtained by dual‐frequency GPS receivers at the five GPS monitor sites and at the U.S. Naval Observatory precise‐time site. The broadcast ephemerides are generated at the GPS master control station by a Kalman filter using data collected from the five GPS monitor stations. The precise post‐processed ephemerides are generated by the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) using data collected from the GPS monitor sites and from five additional DMA monitor sites. In this paper the frequency stability is estimated for two Navstar caesium clocks–a Block I caesium clock (Navstar 9) and a Block II caesium clock (Navstar 23)–using both the broadcast and the precise ephemerides. A significant improvement in the estimate of the frequency stability of the Block II clocks has been achieved using the precise ephemeris.