Rapid Static Positioning Using a Four System GNSS Receivers in the Forest Environment

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are crucial elements used in forest inventories. Forest metrics modeling efficacy depends on the accuracy of determining sample plot locations by GNSS. As of 2021, the GNSS consists of 120 active satellites, ostensibly improving position acquisition in forest conditions. The main idea of this article was to evaluate GIS-class and geodetic class GNSS receivers on 33 control points located in the forest. The main assumptions were operating on four GNSS systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou), keeping a continuous online connection to the network of reference stations, maintaining occupation time-limited to 60 epochs, and repeating all the measurements three times. Rapid static positioning was tested, as it compares the true performance of the four GNSS systems receivers. Statistical differences between the receivers were confirmed. The GIS-class receiver achieved an accuracy of 1.38 m and a precision of 1.29 m, while the geodetic class receiver reached 0.74 m and 0.91 m respectively. Even though the research was conducted under the same data capture conditions, the large variability of positioning results were found to be caused by cycle slips and the multipath effect.

MSTIDs impact on GNSS observations and its mitigation in rapid static positioning at medium baselines

<p>Total electron content (TEC) fluctuation in the ionosphere is one of the main unresolved problems degrading ambiguity resolution and thus affect the reliability of satellite positioning. With regard to conditions prevailing at mid-latitudes, the impact of the upper atmospheric layers is primarily associated with the occurrence of medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs). This study contains the combined analysis involving MSTIDs patterns observed in raw phase data and their impact on rapid static positioning. The first part is aimed at discrepancies in wavelike MSTIDs signatures detected in time series of high elevated measurements. It was demonstrated that the differences in slant ionospheric delays at medium baselines often exceed 0.5 TEC units and more importantly, the detected MSTIDs patterns were highly mutable. The next section presents the impact of MSTIDs on double differenced ionospheric delays and performance of rapid static positioning. The positioning was executed using two approaches. The first one adopted as a benchmark strategy was the geometry-based relative positioning model with weighted ionosphere and troposphere parametrization. The second approach was the improved version of the former. It used the rate of TEC corrections, which allowed the mitigation of MSTIDs through the reduction of epoch-wise ionospheric delays to one parameter for each double-differenced arc. The comparison of results for both strategies indicated significant improvement of positioning performance after the application of proposed algorithm.</p>