A Novel Doppler Frequency Geolocation Method for Multiple Satellites

Abstract

This paper focuses on Doppler positioning of stationary narrowband radars for multiple Low Earth Orbit satellites, single pass scenario. In literature, methods utilize either frequency measurements and/or frequency change of rate (FCR) measurements for geolocation. Methods utilizing frequency measurements use grid search and they solve Least Squares (LS) at each search step in order to estimate center frequency of received signal; hence, they are computationally expensive. Methods based on FCR are highly sensitive to FCR measurement error. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a new geolocation method which uses only frequency measurements without estimating center frequency of received signal and without solving LS. We compare the proposed method to other methods in literature and simulation results show that the proposed method is able to produce effective initial points for an iterative Maximum Likelihood method while it is computationally less expensive than the compared methods.