Abstract
This work demonstrates that precise point positioning (PPP) can be used not only for positioning, but for a variety of other tasks, such as signal analysis. The fact that the observation model used for accurate error modeling has to take into consideration the several effects present in GPS signals, and that observations are undifferenced, makes PPP a powerful data analysis tool sensitive to a variety of parameters. The PPP application developed at the University of New Brunswick, which is called GAPS (GPS Analysis and Positioning Software), has been designed and built in order to take advantage of available precise products, resulting in a data analysis tool for determining parameters in addition to position, receiver clock error, and neutral atmosphere delay. These other estimated parameters include ionospheric delays, code biases, satellite clock errors, and code multipath among others. In all cases, the procedures were developed in order to be suitable for real-time as well as post-processing applications. One of the main accomplishments in the development described here is the use of very precise satellite products, coupled with a very complete observation error modeling to make possible a variety of analyses based on GPS data. In this paper, several procedures are described, their innovative aspects are pointed out, and their results are analyzed and compared with other sources. The procedures and software are readily adaptable for using data from other global navigation satellite systems.
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Acknowledgments
The research reported in this paper has been carried out, in part, under the auspices of the Geomatics for Informed Decisions (GEOIDE) Network of Centres of Excellence project “Next-generation Algorithms for Navigation, Geodesy and Earth Sciences Under Modernized Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).” Support was also provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank Landon Urquhart for some of the data analysis performed for this paper. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice on improving an earlier version the paper.
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Leandro, R.F., Santos, M.C. & Langley, R.B. Analyzing GNSS data in precise point positioning software. GPS Solut 15, 1–13 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-010-0173-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-010-0173-9