In spite of the extensive growth of new positioning solutions experienced in recent years, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) still remain at the core of the navigation technologies. As new use cases emerge, the demands in terms of accuracy and reliability are escalating, and obtaining precise and robust positioning solutions becomes essential for the proper functioning of modern services.

These requirements are not new for certain GNSS sectors, where a high precision positioning has been present for some time. However, bringing these achievements into the mass market entails a hard challenge.

The same happens when robustness is discussed; numerous approaches have been proposed to guarantee the availability of the service, but most of them are far from the mass market due to the complexity or cost. Among the most widespread solutions lies beamforming, which involves deploying multiple antennas at the receiver in order to enhance the desired signals and mitigate undesired contributions that may hinder the performance of the receiver or completely block the service. This approach, broadly employed in fields such as wireless communications, has been entering the GNSS receiver segment during recent years thanks to the miniaturization trends and the cost reduction of the radio-frequency elements, allowing the use of multiple antennas in generic GNSS receivers.

In this work, the potential of beamforming in mass market receivers is analysed using a five-channel low-cost software defined radio (SDR), KrakenSDR, showing the capabilities that conventional and low-complexity spatial diversity techniques provide in harsh scenarios. Lab verification tests using Spirent simulator have been performed to validate the implemented techniques in a software GNSS receiver. The results obtained show a positioning error of below ten meters in the presence of an interference that, without further action taken, would not allow the receiver to acquire the signal.