Hello,
My name is Elijah, I’m a student currently working on my Master of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering. As part of my thesis, I’m working on an orbit propagator algorithm which uses raw GPS data to help determine the position and velocity of CubeSats in low Earth orbit.
To help develop the algorithm, I’m looking to purchase a relatively low-cost receiver to conduct some tests with Earth based observations. For this I need a receiver that is able to output raw data, including: pseudorange, carrier phase, receiver time of week for the measurement reception time, and the navigation data included in the five broadcast GPS subframes. I’m only planning on working with the first L1 C/A frequency, and will only be using information broadcast from the GPS constellation.
From what I can tell, I should be able to receive most/all of this information using a U-Blox receiver that outputs the ‘UBX-RXM-RAWX’ and ‘UBX-RXM-SFRBX’ messages. There are three breakout boards that you offer that I’m currently looking at: the ZED-F9P, NEO-M8P, and NEO-M9N SMA boards. I’ve reached out to U-Blox to confirm whether or not the modules on these boards output the messages I’m looking for, but I also wanted to check whether or not the breakout boards limit the data that I can access from these modules? Additionally, I was wondering if you could make a recommendation on which of these boards would be best suited for my application? I’m not planning to use the receiver for RTK, I would just like to be able to run a few simple experiments where I can log the raw data, as well as the modules computed position/velocity solution. This would allow me to use the raw data in my algorithm to compare against the modules solution.
I really appreciate your help here and I’m looking forward to hearing back from you on this matter!
Thanks