A Comparative Sensitivity Analysis of GPS Receivers

GNSS technologies are progressively becoming one of the key elements in most of innovative wireless applications. Most location-based services and systems are in fact employing standalone GPS, GPS+EGNOS (or WAAS), Assisted-GPS and Differential GPS as core technologies and therefore more and more companies have been integrating GNSS receivers into their consumer products. By considering the large number of available GPS receivers on the market and the lack of standard specifications on the performance, a general evaluation of low cost GPS chipset is very interesting. The present paper describes the performance tests of a set of GPS receivers by different manufacturers in different environmental conditions (outdoor, light indoor, temporary blockage of the signal). The results of the tests are compared with the claimed performance reported on the data sheets. The comparative study on the performance is performed according to different figures of merit: acquisition sensitivity, Time To First Fix (TTFF) and the accuracy. Performance of the different receivers were tested by means of a hardware platform and a software tool called Sat-Surf and Sat-Surfer respectively.