Coarse Acquisition (C/A)-Code

A family of PRN codes transmitted by GPS satellites. Each satellite is assigned one of 32 unique codes in the family. Each code consists of 1,023 chips and is sent at a rate of 1.023 megabits per second. The code sequence repeats every millisecond. The C/A-codes are Gold codes -- PRN codes that are distinguished by a very low cross correlation between any two codes (that is, they are nearly orthogonal). C/A-codes currently are transmitted only on the L1 frequency.