Airborne GPS reflectometry from low altitude aircraft

This work is intended to develop a software-defined Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver specifically designed to process reflected GPS signal off the ground or the ocean surface for purpose of remote sensing. A set of airborne campaign was conducted to evaluate the performance of the prototype GPS reflectometry receiver. The reflected signal was tracked in open-loop manner using the so called delay mapping receiver. The result shows that the prototype receiver was capable of providing altimetric measurements with a precision level of the order of few meters with an unknown system bias which should be estimated.