BDS and GPS side-lobe observation quality analysis and orbit determination with a GEO satellite onboard receiver

Multi-GNSS combination can alleviate problems associated with GNSS-based geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite navigation and orbit determination (OD), such as GNSS availability and observation geometry deterioration. However, only GPS has been widely applied and investigated in GEO missions, whereas GEO OD with BDS requires further exploration. The Chinese GEO satellite TJS-5, equipped with a GPS and BDS-compatible receiver, is the first GEO mission that tracks both BDS 2nd and 3rd generation satellites since BDS global deployment. With the TJS-5 real onboard data, we evaluate BDS side-lobe signal performance and the BDS contribution to GEO OD. Due to transmit antenna gain deficiencies in the side lobes, BDS shows a worse tracking performance than GPS with an average satellite number of 4.3 versus 7.8. Both GPS and BDS reveal inconsistency between carrier-phase and code observations, which reaches several meters and significantly degrades post-dynamic OD calculation. We estimate the consistency as a random walk process in the carrier-phase observation model to reduce its impact. With inconsistency estimated, the post-fit carrier-phase residuals decrease from 0.21 to 0.09 m for both GPS and BDS. The OD precision is significantly improved, from 1.95 to 1.42 m with only GPS and from 3.14 to 2.71 m with only BDS; the GPS and BDS combined OD exhibits the largest improvement from 1.74 to 0.82 m, demonstrating that adding BDS improves the OD precision by 43.3%. The above results indicate that the proposed carrier-phase inconsistency estimation approach is effective for both GPS and BDS and can achieve an orbit precision within 1.0 m using multi-GNSS measurements.