Vertical Accuracies of Mass-Market GNSS Receivers and Antennas in Ellipsoid Reference Survey Strategy for Marine Applications

This paper describes the vertical accuracies achievable using Low-power, Mass-market, Multifrequency, Multi-constellation GNSS (LM3GNSS) receivers, and antennas, and evaluates the results as a precursor to providing alternatives to high-end GNSS hardware on emerging remotely operated and unmanned systems, such as autonomous surface vehicles (ASV), small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), and offshore GNSS buoys. The LM3GNSS receivers are relatively new in the market, and they are affordable ($243 - $2,670). Given their low-power characteristics, they readily fulfill the power budget requirement aboard marine systems. In the first round of our studies, we conducted five experiments in a minivan, which traveled at approximately 80 km per hour (50 mph) with matching pairs of receivers and antennas. We assume that the results should be comparable to solutions aboard a marine vessel at typical hydrographic survey speeds (10 - 20 km per hour {5 - 10 knots}). The matching pairs of receivers include four LM3GNSS hardware, Trimble NetR9 receiver, and Zephyr3 antenna. The results show that LM3GNSS receivers are capable of achieving vertical positioning uncertainties that are within 10 cm of the geodetic results (95% confidence level).