A Galileo Hardware Receiver for the Multi-Constellation Mass Market

In December 2012, the Galileo In-Orbit Validation IOV3 and IOV4 started their test transmissions, bringing the constellation to four satellites. The I/NAV navigation message of the Open Service E1-B signal was switched on shortly after, such that in early 2013 a Galileo-only live positioning could be achieved by the authors using a compact mass market hardware receiver, based on the STA8088 Teseo-II chipset. Another public demonstration of the Galileo capabilities was conducted on July 2013 at Fucino, Italy. During this initial phase, the information fields in the Galileo navigation message have been progressively populated, allowing for direct validation of the receiver software. This paper illustrates the status of the Teseo-II ST receiver (and its successor, Teseo-III), targeted at the multi-constellation mass market. A short summary on the hardware architectures is presented, followed by a description of the new algorithms and software modules. The main focus is given to the support of Galileo (developed in the framework of EU FP7 HIMALAYA project) with some discussion on BeiDou. Simulations and live results, logged from static roof antennas and drives tests, are presented to measure the benefits of Galileo in a multi-constellation scenario.