A Study on the Ionospheric Propagation Using GNSS Receiver Over Hill Region

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been a very integral part of our modern-day communications and navigation. Initially, it was limited for military systems only but now with involvement of both commercial and civilian access to the data, the possibility of development for new applications is endless. So far only there has been a very limited number of Global Systems and a few regional systems which are likely to change in the coming days as more countries are looking to make their presence in earth’s orbit. The applications of GNSS are helping enormously for mapping, surveying, precise positioning, ionosphere research, earth data monitoring and more. But with the newly emerging trends and innovations in the commercial and research and development by so many private enterprises, the need for GNSS will be greater than ever before. More devices will need the use of GNSS to integrate for various applications. The fast-paced innovation has led to the democratization of the system to a large extent. With more development and adoptions of next generation autonomous technology such as driverless cars, automatic traffic management system and more access to high-speed global network, GNSS will play and will have more impact on everyday life in the coming years. Thus, it is important to start finding use cases that can have a large-scale impact. This paper focuses specifically on the use case of GNSS for ground-based measurements that can be further developed for more niche applications. The GNSS receiver and the data used in the study are located at Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim, India. The study presented here is to show that the system is viable and can be developed into products with very important use cases and applications that can be of interests for both commercial and military uses.