Enhancing the accuracy of GPS point positioning by converting the single frequency data to dual frequency data

The global positioning system (GPS) has been used to support a wide variety of applications, such as high-accuracy positioning and navigation. Differential GPS techniques can largely eliminate common-mode errors between the reference and the rover GPS stations resulting from ionospheric and tropospheric refraction and delays, satellite and receiver clock biases, and orbital errors [1]. The ionospheric delay in the propagation of global positioning system (GPS) signals is one of the main sources of error in GPS precise positioning and navigation. A dual-frequency GPS receiver can eliminate (to the first order) the ionospheric delay through a linear combination of the L1 and L2 observations [2]. The most significant effect of ionospheric delay appear in case of using single frequency data. In this paper the single frequency data of concerned station are converted to dual frequency data by employing dual frequency data from 11 regional GPS stations distributed around it. Total electron content (TEC) was calculated at every GPS station to produce the mathematical model of TEC which is a function of latitude (Φ) and longitude (λ). By using this mathematical model the values of TEC and L2 can be predicted at the single frequency GPS station for each satellite, after that the comparison between predicted and observation values of TEC and L2 was performed. The estimation method and test results of the proposed method indicates that the difference between predicted and observation values is very small.