Wide Area Real Time Kinematic (WARTK): Usage of RTCM format, and real-time implementation

Abstract

Nowadays GNSS1 enhancement techniques have reached a relevant impor- tance and are present in a wide variety of applications. During the last years the Research Group of Astronomy and Geomatics (gAGE) from the Tech- nical University of Catalonia (UPC) has developed and tested new satellite navigation techniques which allow the extension of local services based on the real-time carrier phase ambiguity resolution2 to wide area scale (i.e., base- lines between the rover and reference stations greater than 100 km instead of 10 or 20 km as in common DGPS), for both dual-frequency (GPS) and tri-frequency systems (Galileo and Modernized GPS). These are the so-called Wide Area Real Time Kinematic techniques for 2 and 3 frequencies-systems (WARTK-2 and WARTK-3, respectively, see Colombo et al. 1999, 2002 and Hernandez-Pajares et al. 2003 that are based on an optimal combination of accurate ionospheric and geodetic models, in a permanent reference stations network. This Master Thesis touches on two important aspects about WARTK: one regards the broadcasting technique for the WARTK correction messages, and the feasibility of using RTCM 3.1 standard; and the other consists of a real-time implementation of the current WARTK-CPF3 software.