A GPS receiver with built-in precision pointing capability

A Global Positioning System (GPS) pointing experiment using a single five-channel AN/PSN-9 GPS receiver developed for military manpack/vehicular applications is described. The AN/PSN-9 basically a dual-port per channel design, which results in minimum hardware and highest pointing accuracy by using common hardware to perform the GPS differential phase measurements from two GPS antennas. Procedures to solve for the phase double-difference ambiguities are described, and results are presented which demonstrate pointing solution convergence in less than 10 s with arbitrary movement of the antenna beam. Pointing estimates based on filtered, unambiguous phase double-difference observables from AN/PSN-9 GPS pointing unit indicate the potential of achieving 0.5-mr (0.3°) AZ pointing accuracy with only 1-m antenna baseline separation