Chinese Area Positioning System With Wide Area Augmentation

Abstract

The Chinese Area Positioning System (CAPS) is a regional satellite navigation system; its space segment consists of some Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites and 2∼3 Inclined Geo-Synchronous Orbit (IGSO) satellites. Only a few satellites are needed to provide good area coverage and hence it is an ideal space segment for a regional navigation system. A time transfer mode is used to transmit navigation signals, so no high-precision atomic clocks are required onboard the satellites; all of the transferred navigation signals are generated by the same atomic clock at the master control station on the ground. By using virtual clock technology, the time of emission of signals from the ground control station is transformed to the time of transfer of signals at the phase centre of the satellite antenna; thus the impact of ephemeris errors of satellite on positioning accuracy is greatly decreased, enabling the CAPS to have the capability of wide area augmentation. A novel technology of orbit determination, called Paired Observation Combination for Both Stations (POCBS), proposed by the National Time Service Centre, is used in CAPS. The generation and measurement of ranging signals for the orbit survey are carried out in the ground station and the instrument errors are corrected in real-time. The determination of the clock offset is completely independent of the determination of satellite orbit, so the error of the clock offset has no impact on orbit determination. Therefore, a very high precision of satellite orbits, better than 4·2 cm (1 drms) can be obtained by the stations under regional distribution.