Four-Channel Interference of Dual-Antenna GNSS Reflectometry and Water Level Observation

Abstract

The signals at higher elevation angles could be received by a left-handed circularly polarized (LHCP) antenna because LHCP components dominate the reflected signals at higher elevation angles. This letter explores a four-channel interference method of dual-antenna global navigation satellite system (GNSS) reflectometry capable and its application in retrieving the water level. Compared to single-antenna observation using a oscillating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), due to the capability of receiving the reflected signals at high elevation angles, the proposed method has higher temporal resolution. The criterion based on the effective value of the time series is proposed to evaluate the quality of oscillating carrier phase difference. The Lomb–Scargle method and cosine fitting are used to estimate the oscillated frequency of carrier phase difference. Through normalizing cosine oscillation and time scale by the GNSS signal amplitude and wavelength, the time-series from multisatellites could be combined to retrieve the height. At last, the experiment is conducted to demonstrate the proposed method, and the results show that when the criterion threshold is under 0.2, the centimeter-level precision of the retrieved height could be achieved. Two-satellite observation combining satellite pseudorandom noise (PRN) 15 and 24 could decrease the time span of the observation to 320 s from 480 s for only using single satellite, and the root mean square error (RMSE) reduces to 6.2 cm from 9.5 and 18.9 cm of the satellite PRN 15 and 24.