Abstract
This paper describes the design and development of a dedicated GPS receiver for spin stabilized launch vehicles. The receiver is built around a commercially available low cost GPS chip set and operates an enhanced firmware specifically adapted for high dynamics applications. In order to keep tracking a sufficient number of GPS signals even during the spinning motion, we use multiple GPS patch antennas and space them equally apart each other around the cylindrical launcher body. A new signal combining scheme was developed to avoid deep fading in antenna gain pattern. This technique requires phase control to keep signals received on multiple antennas in phase with each other. A dualantenna GPS receiver was developed to evaluate the proposed signal combining algorithm. The result showed that the proposed algorithm was capable of providing stable and continuous signal tracking under a high-rate spinning motion while simple RF combining through a power combiner was failed.
