Doppler sensitivity and its effect on transatlantic TWSTFT links

Some investigations have concluded that the diurnal pattern in the time comparison results of present two way satellite time and frequency transfer (TWSTFT) links may come mainly from Doppler dependent errors in the time of arrival (TOA) measurements made by the receivers of the TWSTFT modems. In this paper, several experiments were carried out to test if there is a Doppler dependent error in the 'delay' measurements of the receivers currently used. By simulating quantitative Doppler effects in the time transfer signal both on the carrier and the code, a type of Doppler sensitivity on the code was observed in the receivers, which has about - 0.49 ns offset in 'delay' measurement for a 1 x 10(-9) fractional Doppler shift. This sensitivity is basically the same for modems with different serial numbers from the same manufacture. We calculated this Doppler caused diurnal pattern in the time comparison results of the transatlantic TWSTFT link between NIST and PTB and found that it is very small and negligible, because the Doppler dependent error is almost identical in the NIST and PTB measurements and therefore it is nearly canceled in the TWSTFT difference.