Applicability of Cost-Effective GNSS Sensors for Crustal Deformation Studies

Abstract

The geodetic monitoring of the continuous crustal deformation in a particular region has traditionally been the prerogative of the scientific communities capable of affording high-price geodetic-class instruments to track the tiny movements of tectonic plates without losing precision. However, GNSS technology has been continuously and rapidly growing, and in the last years, new cost-efficient instruments have entered the mass market, gaining the attention of the scientific community for potentially being high-performing alternative solutions. In this study, we match in parallel a dual-frequency low-cost receiver with two high-price geodetic instruments, all connected to the same geodetic antenna. We select North-East Italy as testing area, and we process the data together with the observations coming from a network of GNSS permanent stations operating in this region. We show that mm-order precision can be achieved by cost-effective GNSS receivers, while the results in terms of time series are largely comparable to those obtained using high-price geodetic receivers.

Evaluación del posicionamiento preciso a través de los receptores GPS LEA-6T, NEO-M8T y ZED-F9P de bajo costo

“…Por otro lado, los receptores de bajo costo de una frecuencia resultan ser una buena opción para establecer una línea base, ya que se obtuvieron resultados similares a los expuestos por Zamora Maciel et al Por otro lado, respecto a lograr una alta precisión para trabajos de deformación de la corteza terrestre con receptores de bajo costo GNSS, los resultados alcanzados demuestran que no son óptimos para realizar el análisis de deformación de la corteza, ya que, se encuentra una menor precisión que la reportada por Tunini et al (2022). Esto se deriva del uso de modelos implementados en softwares científicos y antenas de nueva generación con calibración para mitigar el efecto multitrayectoria.…”

Improving the precision and accuracy of wildlife monitoring with multi‐constellation, multi‐frequency GNSS collars

“…Once the GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou systems are fully deployed, >140 satellites will be available for navigation and positioning applications (Li et al 2022). The number of GNSS signals and services already deployed has enabled new levels of performance in terms of accuracy, covering a wide range of application areas such as surveying and geomatics (Garrido et al 2018, 2019; Tunini et al 2022), engineering (Barzaghi et al 2018, Pipitone et al 2018, Xiao et al 2019), and environmental science (Awange 2018), and recent studies show the advantages of multi‐constellation solutions considering several GNSS positioning techniques (Gao et al 2019, Liu et al 2020, Dardanelli et al 2021, Li et al 2021, Paziewski et al 2021). With the current multi‐constellation scenario, a GNSS device previously able to receive satellite signals from about 8 GPS satellites under open sky can now access more than 30 satellites, albeit at the cost of reduced battery life.…”

Behavior of Low-Cost Receivers in Base-Rover Configuration with Geodetic-Grade Antennas

“…Hamza et al [ 13 ] showed that on a basis of 30-min sessions the instruments can detect displacements from 10 mm upwards with a high level of reliability. In [ 14 ], Tunini et al matched, in parallel, the ZED-F9P receiver with two high-price geodetic instruments, all connected to the same geodetic antenna. They processed the data, together with the observations coming from a network of GNSS permanent stations operating in that region.…”