GPS has become a valuable means for kinematic positioning in the past 15 years. An accuracy of approximately 1 centimetre (standard deviation) can be reached over short baselines, but a reference station needs to be established in the vicinity of the roving antenna in order to appropriately reduce the acting error sources. Economic considerations, however, require that reference station networks are planned such that the spatial resolution is kept at a minimum while taking the required accuracy of the kinematic solution as a primary design parameter. Active reference station networks in Germany, for instance, have inter-station distances of about 50 kilometres in average. The stations’ data are used to derive ionospheric, tropospheric and satellitespecific area correction parameters. Unfortunately, this state-of-the-art methodology cannot be used in many scientific applications as it is failed to fulfil necessary pre-requisites. Consequently, the work depicted in this report aims to apply the conventional baseline concept to reach high accuracy in kinematic positioning even over long distances to the reference station(s). Apart from an introduction to the basics of kinematic GPS data analysis and the description of the underlying error model it will be demonstrated that precise coordinates can actually be retrieved over baselines as long as about 300 km in kinematic mode. A major limitation of this method lies in the fact that the current GPS visibility situation is relatively weak for this purpose, i.e. a larger number of visible satellites would significantly improve the situation. For this reason, this report concludes in outlining the innovations in satellite navigation which are about to become reality in the very near future and have an incisive impact on position estimation »on the move«.
«GPS has become a valuable means for kinematic positioning in the past 15 years. An accuracy of approximately 1 centimetre (standard deviation) can be reached over short baselines, but a reference station needs to be established in the vicinity of the roving antenna in order to appropriately reduce the acting error sources. Economic considerations, however, require that reference station networks are planned such that the spatial resolution is kept at a minimum while taking the required accuracy...
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