Clarifying the Relationship between Quality of Global Positioning System Data and Precision of Positioning

Abstract

This study selected five indexes to determine the relationship between data quality and positioning precision. These indexes are multipath on L1, multipath on L2, observations by cycle slips, clock offset, and clock stability. To reduce the number of common errors, six types of global positioning system (GPS) receivers are selected and set up in an Ultra-Short Distance Network at the National Measurement Laboratory, Taiwan, for 3 days. The first three indicators are calculated with the Teqc software, and the last two indicators are computed using the Bernese software. Moreover, the observations from three GPS tracking stations, namely, short baseline (about 25 km), middle baseline (about 150 km), and long baseline (around 2000 km), were downloaded from the Internet and processed using Bernese software. Analytical results indicate that clock stability and observations divided by cycle slips are found to be very important positioning factors. Clock offset and multipath effects do not significantly affect the GPS results.