Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Global Positioning System Receivers: A Software Approach (Wiley Series in Microwave and Optical Engineering)

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Lets face it, there are plenty of GPS textbooks on the market that satisfy all levels of inquiry.

My first criticism of the book is that the first six chapters are well covered in most of the standard texts. I believe that the primary reason someone would want to purchase this book is for the last few chapters, (particularly chapter 9 which discusses GPS software receivers), as well as for the accompanying Matlab source code in the textbook. (At least that was my reason).

My second criticism is that this book desperately needs an editor. There are a tremendous number of grammatical errors and spelling errors that I found incredibly distracting from the contents of the book. In addition, many of the illustrative plots used in the text have no units specified for the axes, and little description of the figures is given in the body of the text.

Finally, the code that is included at the end of each chapter is poorly organized and poorly documented. There are very few comments in the various code sections and the author insists on using terribly ambiguous variable names. All of which could be forgiven if the Matlab code provided actually worked!! Many of the routines in the all-important 9th chapter on GPS software receivers call user-defined functions that are not actually defined anywhere in the textbook! In an attempt to be proactive, I emailed the author and asked for a copy of the missing Matlab code and was told that the codes are not available for download.
Disappointing indeed! (I think that an accompanying CD with a snippet of IF data and a set of working Matlab codes would be a wonderful addition to a 2nd edition of the book.)

For what its worth, I think the approach taken in the textbook is great, but until a revised 2nd edition of the textbook is produced I would recommend that you save your money.

Very good introductory book if you are a starter in the GPS field.

The content is definitely targeted at the professional audience who is familiar with GPS and satellite communications. What I liked about the book is that the mathematical derivations are presented in a simple, yet comprehensive manner. There are also some Matlab sample code that describe some of the concepts in each chapter.

Although this is an introductory book, it may appear daunting to people who do not have a strong understanding of matrix algebra -- not bed-time reading.

Overall, this is a good book that will satisfy a novice or an intermediate-level professional.

This book does a good job at explaining the fundamentals of GPS operation. It breaks things down to an understandable level and presents most material well. However, it is not thorough enough to be used to design a software receiver. The book covers Costas loops and DLL's in a very cursory manner. It is also filled with typos and other errors. If your actually attempting to build a software receiver, try some of these books: "Understanding GPS Principles and Applications" by Elliot Kaplan (Ed.), "Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications Volume 1" by B. W. Parkinson and J. J. Spilker (Ed.'s), "Global Positioning System: Signals Measurements and Performance" by P. Misra and Per Enge. These books are far more detailed and are relatively free of errors.

Tsui gives a solid exposition of how to use a GPS signal. He describes how the signal is encoded and what you must do to extract the information. It is assumed that you have already worked in communications theory.

The text also discusses the geometric considerations inherent in understanding the ephemeris data. At one point, we are taken back to basic astronomy and Kepler's laws of motion!

Another reviewer has remarked that the code samples seem incomplete or wrong. Even so, keep in mind that this is only a small portion of the text. The explanations of the theory appear well founded.

I am working on GPS receiver design using software approch . I am referring this book . I have some queries regarding Matlab program given in the book (Chapter 9).Can somebody help ?