Abstract
Irregularly structured ionospheric regions can cause diffraction and scattering of trans-ionospheric GNSS signals. When received at an antenna, these signals present random temporal fluctuations in both amplitude and phase, as known ionospheric scintillation. In addition to worsening the signal quality, ionospheric irregularity related to scintillation will break down the spatial correlation structure of ionosphere, leading to a degradation of differential GNSS performance. As the data analysis shows that during a scintillation event, the length of baseline on which DGNSS could be used will be reduced to a much shorter distance comparing with that under undisturbed ionosphere condition. The residual error caused by scintillation related irregularity increases as the length of baseline increase during the scintillation event. The residual error under scintillation could be 2–4 times bigger than that of no scintillation effects. The accuracy of scintillation effected DGNSS is even worse than that of under quiet ionosphere condition for baselines longer than 20 km as indicated by our analysis in this paper.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Survey and Mapping Office/Lands Department, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, for the GPS data from SatRef.
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Liu, D., Deng, Z., Feng, J., Zhen, W. (2012). A Study of Ionospheric Scintillation Effects on Differential GNSS. In: Sun, J., Liu, J., Yang, Y., Fan, S. (eds) China Satellite Navigation Conference (CSNC) 2012 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 159. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29187-6_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29187-6_33
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