GNSS Software Defined Radio Metadata Standard was published in NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation’s Spring 2021 issue, volume 68, n ° 1, p. 11-20.

The metadata standard is the product of a three-year long effort of the ION GNSS SDR Standard working group and defines the parameters and schema for expressing the content of SDR sample data files. The standard promotes the interoperability of GNSS SDR data collection systems and processors.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of software-defined radio data collection (SDR) systems and processing platforms designed for or applicable to satellite navigation applications. These systems necessarily produce data sets in a wide range of different formats.

To correctly interpret this SDR data, essential information such as the format of the packaged sample and the sampling frequency is needed. Communicating this metadata between creators and users has always been an ad hoc, cumbersome, and error-prone process.

To solve this problem, the satnav SDR community has developed the standard and normative metadata software library to automate the process, thus simplifying the exchange of datasets and promoting the interoperability of satnav SDR systems.

The standard was ratified and officially accepted as an Institute of Navigation standard in January.

The export citation of formal standards documents is here.