Kevin Parkinson

Open GNSS Receiver Platform

This paper presents results from the open GNSS receiver platform that has been under development at the School of Surveying and SIS at the University of New South Wales since mid 2004. The aim of the project is to create the first open source GNSS receiver design based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology for research and development. The project is on target with many parts complete and initial results looking good. It is hoped that eventually the hardware components along with the FPGA design files and GPS firmware will become available as a development kit and possibly as an integrated IP block available from one of the FPGA providers. The platform consists of a custom circuit board, a baseband processor design and application firmware. Version one of the circuit board has been built and tested. It has a GPS L1 RF front end, Altera FPGA chip and support components. The baseband design is complete and shown to operate correctly. The application firmware has been ported to the new platform and testing and tuning are on-going. Design aspects and results from each component is discussed, followed by ideas for the future.