Smooth transition from acquisition to tracking

GNU Radio
1

Hi all,

I have the following question that came up in our attempt to implement
an GPS receiver.

Suppose samples are coming in from the USRP at a sampling rate of Fs
and in the beginning we grab N such samples (say 2msec worth of data) to
process them for initial acquisition of frequency/code epoch.
Now suppose that the task of acquisition is quite heavy so that it takes
approximately time T (say for example ~10sec) to be completed.
At the end of this process we have an estimate of the code delay “tau”
In the meantime samples are accumulating on the incoming queue of our
block.

We see two problems with that:

  1. the queues will overflow so samples will start being dropped and
  2. once the above happens, then the estimate “tau” is meaningless

One solution that I see to this is during the acquisition task to
periodically interupt the processing and consume a known ammount of data
(say equal to the code period) so that 1) does not happen and 2) we have
a way to relate the estimate “tau” to the incoming data after
acquisition.

I wanted to ask
a) if we are on the right track,
b) if there is a simple method to implement such interupts, and
c) if there is an easier way to do that other than the one suggested.

Thanks
Achilleas

2

Have a FIFO that hold 1 millisecond chunks of IF data. Let each 1 ms
chunk be tagged with a number, k. The acquisition will grab a 1 ms
chunk, k, while the rest of the receiver will go ahead and process
subsequent chunks on the FIFO. When the acquisition is complete, you can
start a correlator at some new 1 ms chunk, k+m. You then use the Doppler
frequency the acquisition returns to propagate the delay, t at chunk k,
to a new delay at chunk k+m. Here is the corresponding code in my
software receiver (found in correlator.cpp):

/* Update delay based on current packet count */
dt = packet.count - result.count;
dt *= .001;
dt = (double)result.doppler(double)CODE_RATE/(double)L1;
result.delay += CODE_CHIPS + dt;
result.delay = fmod(result.delay, CODE_CHIPS);

Check out my software receiver at www.gps-sdr.com. It works with the
USRP and DBS-RX card in realtime.