Septentrio PolaRx5S Ionospheric Monitoring GNSS Reference Receiver

The PolaRx5S is Septentrio's dedicated ionospheric monitoring GNSS reference receiver — the instrument the company positions for scintillation, space-weather and signal-integrity monitoring networks. Its 544-channel engine tracks all visible signals across the full GNSS spectrum — GPS (L1, L2, L5), GLONASS (L1, L2, L3), Galileo (E1, E5ab, AltBOC, E6), BeiDou (B1, B2, B3), NavIC/IRNSS (L5), QZSS (L1, L2, L5) and all-in-view SBAS including L5 — streaming code, carrier phase, signal intensity and raw I&Q correlation data at up to 100 Hz. An ultra-low-noise OCXO frequency reference enables phase-scintillation measurement with a Phi60 noise floor of 0.03 rad, and the receiver outputs total electron content (TEC) and scintillation indices (S4, Phi01/03/10/30/60, code-carrier divergence, scintillation intensity) in real time, with standard ISMR records generated by the supplied SBF2ISMR utility.

For airports and air navigation service providers, the PolaRx5S doubles as a continuous GNSS interference and integrity monitor. Septentrio's AIM+ (Advanced Interference Monitoring and Mitigation) system samples the RF environment through a built-in spectrum analyser and detects, flags and mitigates interference from continuous narrowband carriers to wideband and pulsed transmitters, Inmarsat and Iridium signals and chirp jammers — the interference classes that degrade GNSS-dependent approach, surveillance and timing services. Jamming and spoofing events can be visualised in the web-interface spectrum plots, giving the operator a permanent, timestamped record of RF events and ionospheric disturbances affecting GNSS performance at the aerodrome.

The receiver is engineered for unattended reference-station deployment: 3.8–6 W scalable power consumption from a 9–30 VDC input, Power-over-Ethernet, integrated Wi-Fi, four serial ports, USB, a 10 MHz reference input and PPS output, and 16 GB of onboard logging with up to 8 simultaneous sessions and FTP push, in a rugged housing operating from −40 °C to +65 °C. Configuration and monitoring run through the built-in web UI and the RxTools suite for Windows and Linux. Galileo, BeiDou and IRNSS tracking and 100 Hz raw-data output are optional features.