Elimination of Clock Jump Effects in Low-Quality Differential GPS Measurements

Abstract

Most of single frequency GPS receivers utilize low-quality crystal oscillators. If a lowquality crystal oscillator is utilized as the time reference of a GPS receiver, the receiver's clock bias grows very fast due to its inherent low precision and poor stability. To prevent the clock bias becoming too large, large clock jumps are intentionally injected to the clock bias and the time offset for clock steering purpose. The abrupt changes in the clock bias and the time offset, if not properly considered, induce serious accuracy degradation in relative differential positioning. To prevent the accuracy degradation, this paper proposes an efficient and systematic method to eliminate the undesirable clock jump effects. Experiment results based on real measurements verify the effectiveness of the propose method.