Novel Approach to Determine the Effects of MS Environment using the Portable GPS Receiver with Built-in Antenna

Communication impairment on the Mobile Satellite (MS) path for non-geostationary satellite is mainly due to effect of multipath and shadowing. In order to study the signal quality received by the MS user, a receiver system that has similar characteristics to the actual receiver used by the MS user should be used. This study presents a novel approach to determine the MS signal quality by using a portable, handheld and commercially available Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver with built-in small-size antenna that imitates the actual receiver used by the MS users. It offers a low-cost and simple to manage method of studying the MS environment. Propagation data for the open space environment are measured and used as reference to determine the MS signal quality for the tree shadowed and building shadowed environments. Comparisons are made with the results obtained using different type of receiver system to show the feasibility of this type of receiver.