Medium frequency broadcast of differential GPS data

The broadcast performance of DGPS (differential global positioning systems)/radio beacons is studied. It is found that a combination of receiver limiting and forward error corrections is very effective against the atmospheric noise which characterizes the MF band. This combination significantly reduces the probability of bit error and the average time between differential updates. The authors compute the probability of link outage versus range, and find that forward error correction significantly increases DGPS/radio beacon coverage. It is found that groundwave/skywave interference slightly increases the probability of outage at moderate ranges. An estimate is made of the expected duration of outage for the DGPS/radio beacon signal. All results are based on analytical and experimental results