Validation of a Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA) Receiver Built from Inexpensive General-purpose Elements During Several Live Jamming Test Campaigns

The Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA) is an effective approach for rejecting radio frequency interference. Conventionally, the dedicated CRPA antenna and hardware are usually precisely manufactured and calibrated carefully. The computational/processing requirement is always a major challenge for implementing a CRPA receiver. Even more demanding would be to incorporate the flexibility of the Software-Defined Radio (SDR) design philosophy in such an implementation. The Stanford University (SU) CRPA receiver development tackles these challenges to try to demonstrate the feasibility of a low cost commercial implementation by leveraging a SDR using Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) components. This paper will discuss our realtime implementation of a COTS CRPA software receiver, its performance under numerous jamming conditions, and the lessons learned from these various trials. The developed CRPA receiver was tested in the live-jamming exercises in the US and Sweden. The scenarios include 1) dynamic jammers 2) static/multiple jammers in the various locations 3) different jammer types. This paper shows the test results including the C/No improvement. From these results, we can see the benefit of our implementation compared to a commercial receiver. We also “replay” the signal from the collected data sets. With this replay functionality, the signal from a single antenna and the composite signals by MVDR/power minimization algorithms are transmitted to commercial high-sensitivity GPS receiver. The replay results give us a true comparison between different algorithms/platforms.