A Method to Determine Secondary Codes and Carrier Phases of Short Snapshot Signals

Recently, the Snapshot Real-Time Kinematic (SRTK) technique was demonstrated, which aims at achieving high accuracy navigation solutions with a very short signal collection. The main challenge in implementing SRTK is the generation of valid carrier-phase measurements, which relies on a data bit ambiguity (DBA) resolution process. For pilot signals, this step is equivalent to the correct selection of secondary code indexes (SCIs) from the ambiguous sets obtained from a multi-hypotheses (MH) acquisition process. Currently, SCI ambiguities are solved independently for each satellite. However, this method is ineffective when the snapshot signal is relatively short. In order to tackle this problem, this article proposes a new method that makes use of assistance data and processes information from all satellites to jointly solve the DBA issue. This new method is shown to be more effective in determining the correct SCI and enabling valid snapshot carrier-phase measurements, largely expanding the scope of high-accuracy snapshot positioning.