New method of the precise propagation delay measurement

The measurement of the signal propagation delay is essential for positioning, navigation and timing applications. In this paper, we proposed a new method, transmitting the multicarrier pseudorandom noise (PRN) signals and measuring the group delay as the precise signal propagation delay by weighted least squares (WLS) technique, so that the bandwidth can be more effectively utilized. The platform of realizing signal transmission and delay estimation has been developed. The precision between our method and the conventional one is also compared in this paper. With the same signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and occupied bandwidth, the results show that the proposed method can provide better precision than the conventional one.