A Smartphone App for GNSS Ionospheric Data Collection: Initial Field Test Results

Abstract

A key remaining problem in ionospheric monitoring via GNSS is that of the global sparseness of GNSS ground receiver distribution. Data transport over the "last mile" from each deployed receiver to data processing environments is still a costly challenge. The Mahali project (mahali.mit.edu) tackles this problem by using off-the-shelf mobile smartphones as relays. In this paper, we present the Mahali GNSS Logger App that connects Android smartphones to GNSS receivers over USB and uploads RINEX files to Dropbox. These files can then be processed to obtain Total Electron Content (TEC) plots of the ionosphere. We report here on the initial testing of this app and the scientific measurements obtained during January and February 2015 field tests in Brazil.