Scintillation Characteristics Across the GPS Frequency Band

We investigate the characteristics of ionospheric scintillation across the entire GPS frequency band spanning the L5–L1 carrier signals (1176 MHz–1575 MHz). Of particular interest is the intensity correlation between carrier pairs, since this dictates the extent to which frequency diversity may be leveraged to mitigate scintillation impacts on navigation accuracy. Since only a few satellites currently broadcast the L2C and L5 signals, a limited number of scintillation field measurements have been collected to date. We show recent scintillations observations on L2C in Brazil collected in April 2012. Since current solar conditions are less disturbed than during the previous two solar maximum periods, however, it is not possible to explore the full range of scintillation conditions with current measurements alone. Therefore, we have developed a high-fidelity simulation technique to infer the complex (amplitude and phase) fluctuations of the L2 and L5 carrier signals from complex fluctuations of the L1 carrier signal recorded during the previous solar maximum. We compare this technique with two stochastic approaches which use the S4 index, rather than the raw complex data, as input. After demonstrating that the three techniques yield consistent results, we apply the simplest of these approaches to a database of L1 S4 observations