Determination of Distance Between a Moving Ship and Drifting Buoys to Centimeter-Level Accuracy at Sea Using L1 Phase GPS Receivers and Differential Moving-Base Kinematic Processing

James A. Doutt, George V. Frisk,Hugh Martell

Abstract:	There are many applications in oceanography where knowledge of the precise distance between two moving objects is of great interest. One such application is an acoustic synthetic aperture experiment where a series of measurements of the acoustic field as a sound source and receiver change range can be used to simulate or synthesize results which would be obtained from a towed horizontal array. In order to create the synthetic aperture, the relative separation between the acoustic source and receiver must be known to a fraction of an acoustic wavelength (e.g., the wavelength at 300 Hz is five meters). The Global Positioning System (GPS) can be used to make these measurements: for instance, the relative position vector between a moving base station on a ship and a mobile remote station on a drifting buoy can be computed. In the modal mapping shallow-water acoustics experiment (MOMAX) performed off the coast of New Jersey in March 1997, pseudorange and L1 carrier phase GPS data from the ship and from drifting buoys were recorded for post-processing with high-precision, differential, moving-baseline-kinematic processing software. Two GPS antennas were fixed on the ship: one directly above a towed acoustic source, the other about 28 meters away. A third antenna was mounted on a drifting buoy. Distances between the ship and buoy ranged from some meters to over five kilometers. For each one-second epoch both the distance between the two ship-mounted antennas and the triangle closure error between the ship-mounted antennas and the buoy were computed. These results served as quality control on the GPS data. The closure errors were a few centimeters, given reasonable satellite geometry.
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:	1301 - 1306
Cite this article:	Doutt, James A., Frisk, George V., Martell, Hugh, "Determination of Distance Between a Moving Ship and Drifting Buoys to Centimeter-Level Accuracy at Sea Using L1 Phase GPS Receivers and Differential Moving-Base Kinematic Processing," Proceedings of the 11th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1998), Nashville, TN, September 1998, pp. 1301-1306.
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