Testing Decimeter-Level, Kinematic, Differential GPS Over Great Distances at Sea and on Land

Oscar L. Colombo, Alan G. Evans

Abstract:	Long-range kinematic GPS with carrier phase, as implemented by the first author, was evaluated in both at-sea and on-land tests. The at-sea testing was done on board a moving boat and on a nearly stationary platform in the North Sea. Baseline lengths ranged from a few kilometers (for control purposes) to more than 2000 km. The on-land testing was performed to provide more strict control, and was conducted by the second author on the behalf of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division. Here, a low-dynamics vehicle traveled along a desert service road at Holloman AFB, New Mexico. The receiver was driven slowly up and down this road, stopping at bench-marked sites. The sites were reoccupied every two or three hours. The long-baseline results were checked for consistency at successive occupations of the same bench marks, and against short-baseline kinematic positioning relative to a local site. The long-baseline fiducial sites were 796 km and 1470 km away, in Platteville, Colorado, and in Monterey, California, respectively. The outcome of the tests indicate an overall r.m.s. precision in post-processing, over several hours, of better than one part in 10,000,000 for baselines longer than 1000 km. Results were similar using either the final IGS SP3 ephemeris for the days of the experiments, or the predicted orbits broadcast in the GPS navigation message. Corrections to the broadcast orbits (when used), as well as ionospheric-free phase biases and tropospheric zenith delay mismodeling, were all estimated simultaneously with each trajectory.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 11th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1998) September 15 - 18, 1998 Nashville, TN
Pages:	1257 - 1264
Cite this article:	Colombo, Oscar L., Evans, Alan G., "Testing Decimeter-Level, Kinematic, Differential GPS Over Great Distances at Sea and on Land," Proceedings of the 11th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1998), Nashville, TN, September 1998, pp. 1257-1264.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In