Effects of Site-Dependent Errors on the Accuracy of C/A Code DGPS Positioning

Several differential GPS processing techniques can be used; for instance, single differencing and double differencing, which are popular in practice. Irrespective of the DGPS processing technique used, the ultimate accuracy of the user-location depends on the existence of non-common or site-dependent errors, which occur at the points of observation and the reference. Of these, the most common and dominant site-dependent error is the multipath. Therefore, this research evaluates the effects of site-dependent errors on C/A code differential GPS correction accuracies by providing special emphasis on the multipath error. For the analyses, four segments of about 24-hour continuous static C/A code based DGPS observations were conducted at three precisely known ground stations and four different multipath environments were introduced by placing three different types of artificial signal reflectors at one of the observation stations. By using the known GPS receiver-reflector configuration, pseudo-range multipath was precisely calculated for each observation segment. C/A code DGPS positioning accuracies before and after multipath mitigation were presented by evaluating the effect of the most dominant site-dependent error, i.e., multipath, on C/A code DGPS correction accuracies.

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