We have demonstrated the potential of employing a wide-area differential GPS approach to mitigate the differential positioning errors seen by marine users of DGPS services. It is intended that such a technique might be implemented using existing Canadian or United States Coast Guard reference stations. Archived data were not available from Canadian Coast Guard stations and so we generated comparable WADGPS results using observations from Canadian IGS stations. We evaluated two networks: Network 1 with station spacings of 200-750 kilometers, and Network 2 with station spacings of 110-150 kilometers. For the larger-baseline network, some improvements were observed for WADGPS versus single-reference DGPS during the storm events. The WADGPS method did not improve horizontal positioning errors to within the 10 meters (95 percent) threshold, however, and the lack of significant overall improvement for WADGPS within this network is attributed to the large station spacing — which does not allow adequate resolution of ionospheric features.
展开▼
