Blind Adaptive Joint Code–Carrier Channel Combining for GNSS in Complex Array Environments

GNSS array receivers suffer tracking degradation under array nonidealities such as element-position perturbations, channel amplitude/phase errors, and slowly varying manifold mismatch. Conventional blind anti-jamming suppresses interference, but adaptive weight fluctuations can propagate into the correlator domain, increasing cross-branch correlation, causing Early/Late metric imbalance, and reducing Prompt phase consistency. Existing noncoherent combining methods mainly convert multi-branch correlator outputs into scalar energy metrics for code tracking, leaving the carrier loop’s complex Prompt input insufficiently constrained. To address this problem, we propose a blind adaptive joint code–carrier channel-combining method for nonideal arrays. After first-stage anti-jamming, the method estimates an Early/Late correlator-domain covariance matrix and reuses it as a shared statistical constraint. In the code loop, this matrix drives whitened noncoherent energy combining with closed-loop gain normalization to stabilize the DLL discriminator scale. In the carrier loop, it is combined with a Prompt-derived coherent direction to form a covariance-constrained PLL complex input. Simulations under wideband interference, static array errors, and dynamic mismatch show that the proposed J-WNCC reduces both code-phase error and carrier-phase jitter, improving joint tracking robustness in nonideal array environments. Ablation results further reveal a dominant-effect separation: DLL gain normalization mainly calibrates the whitened code-discriminator scale, whereas coherent Prompt combining mainly reconstructs the complex PLL input.