Preliminary Comparison of Two-Way Satellite Time and Frequency Transfer and GPS Common-View Time Transfer During the Intelsat Field Trial

Abstract

For a decade and a half GPS Common-View time transfer has greatly served the needs of primary timing laboratories for regular intercomparisons of remote atomic clocks. However, GPS as a one-way technique has natural limits and may not meet all challenges of the comparison of the coming new generations of atomic clocks. Two-Way Satellite Time and Frequency Transfer (TWSTFT) is a promising technique which may successfully complement GPS. For two years, regular TWSTFT's have been performed between eight laboratories situated in both Europe and North America, using INTELSAT satellites. This has enabled an extensive direct comparison to be made between these two high performance time-transfer methods. The performance of the TWSTFT and GPS Common-View methods are compared over a number of time-transfer links. These links use a variety of time-transfer hardware and atomic clocks and have baselines of substantially different lengths. The relative merits of the two time-transfer systems are discussed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1995
Accession Number
ADA518476

Entities

People

  • A. Mckinley
  • A. Soering
  • D. Kirchner
  • F. Baumont
  • G. De Jong
  • H. Ressler
  • J. A. Davis
  • J. A. Deyoung
  • K. A. Bartle
  • L. Veenstra
  • P. Hetzel
  • R. Robnik
  • T. Parker
  • W. Klepczynski
  • W. Lewandowski

Organizations

  • National Physical Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Satellites
  • Atomic Beam Masers
  • Atomic Clocks
  • Clocks
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Sets
  • Ephemerides
  • Frequency
  • Geosynchronous Satellites
  • Global Positioning Systems
  • Hydrogen
  • Instrumentation
  • Measurement
  • North America
  • Standards
  • Time Intervals

Readers

  • Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Technology.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Space