Geographical Features of Satellite Visibility Viewed from Running Vehicles Based on GPS Signal Sensing

A novel scheme is proposed and demonstrated where satellite visibility viewed from running vehicle is economically and effectively evaluated with such low cost GPS receivers like automobiles are equipped with. Our preliminary experiment articulated even economical LI C/A 1.5 GHz GPS receivers can create enough precise database of ground feature blockage, compared to fisheye photograph method, if only two statistical parameters we propose are adequately set. This scheme demonstrates the geographical features of satellite visibility from a vehicle running in a metropolitan, a highway and an urban city. The latent possibility for this scheme effectively to create a useful blockage database suitable to the future-oriented vehicular satellite communication society is also discussed from the sociological viewpoint of the civil activities with the vehicles.