DETERMINATION OF GPS RECEIVER CLOCK ERRORS USING UNDIFFERENCE PHASE DATA

Enhancing the positioning precision is the primary pursuit of GPS users. To achieve this goal, most studies have focused on the relationship between GPS receiver clock errors and GPS positioning precision. This study utilizes undifferentiated phase data to calculate GPS clock errors and to compare with the frequency of cesium clock directly, thus verifying estimated clock errors by the method used in this paper. The relative frequency offsets from this paper and from National Standard Time and Frequency Laboratory of Taiwan match to $1.5{\times}10^{12}$ in the frequency instability, suggesting that the proposed technique has reached a certain level of quality. The built-in quartz clocks in the GPS receivers yield relative frequency offsets that are 3 to 4 orders higher than those of rubidium clocks. The frequency instability of the quartz clocks is on average two orders worse than that of the rubidium clock. Using the rubidium clock instead of the quartz clock, the horizontal and vertical positioning accuracies were improved by 26-78% (0.6-3.6 mm) and 20-34% (1.3-3.0 mm), respectively, for a short baseline. These improvements are 7-25% (0.3-1.7 mm) and 11% (1.7 mm) for a long baseline. Our experiments show that the frequency instability of clock, rather than relative frequency offset, is the governing factor of positioning accuracy.