New publication
"Estimation of Tropospheric Parameters with GNSS Smartphones in a Differential Approach" by Stauffer et al. (2023)
There are currently over 6.5 billion GNSS receivers in use worldwide, whereby most of these receivers are integrated into smartphones. In 2016, Google introduced the Android 7 Nougat operating system, which for the first time allowed access to raw GNSS code and carrier-phase observations. These observations can now be processed with state-of-the-art GNSS processing software, enabling an in-depth evaluation of the smartphone's GNSS performance.
In this study, we investigate the capability of GNSS smartphones for tropospheric path delay estimation. Using a Google Pixel 4 XL dual-frequency GNSS smartphone, measurements are collected over two weeks and processed with relative positioning methods. The estimated time series of differential zenith wet delays (dZWD) are then combined with absolute values estimated at the reference station to obtain zenith total delays (ZTD). We demonstrate that high-precision ZTDs can be successfully determined using this method. When comparing the smartphone estimates with those from a nearby reference station, differences ranging from a few millimeters to a centimeter are visible. The proposed method, therefore, shows the potential to resolve small-scale tropospheric structures in near-real time.
More information and detailed results can be found in the corresponding MST article, available here: external page https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6501/acd077/meta
