Investigation of GPS antenna mean phase centre offsets using a full roving observation strategy

Abstract

In practice, a relatively simple calibration method of full rotation and antenna swapping techniques can be used to control individual GPS antenna mean phase centre offsets without any ground truth survey. Based on these techniques a new full roving strategy is introduced, which is a generalisation of the full rotation and antenna swapping techniques for estimating all of the three components of the mean phase centre offsets in one processing step. This new technique can be used not only for calibration purposes, but also as an observation strategy for a local high-precision network. In the latter case, the proposed method is similar to the classical geodetic approaches, where the biases are cancelled or estimated by proper observation strategies.