With the aim to actively support and to accelerate the most widespread adoption of Galileo, Spaceopal today announces the launch of NAVCAST, its GNSS Precise Point Positioning (PPP) service featuring high accuracy positioning enhancement for end users worldwide.
NAVCAST provides Galileo and GPS real time orbit and clock corrections based on an algorithm RETICLE (REal-TIme CLock Estimation), developed by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR e.V.). Galileo and GPS observations, from more than 100 receivers of the world-wide IGS network, are used to estimate the current corrections which are broadcasted to registered users relaying on the standard NTRIP protocol. NAVCAST corrections improve the user error down to the centimeter level, making it very attractive for a large number of applications, according to a press release issued today by Spaceopal.
Now it is possible to appraise the accuracy levels and convergence times achievable using NAVCAST (Galileo + GPS) corrections combined with a precise point positioning (PPP) engine, on the Spaceopal website (spaceopal.com). The underlying PPP engine (dual frequency, ionosphere free observations) estimates the local troposphere delays and fixes the carrier phase integer ambiguities. NAVCAST can be considered as proof of concept and Spaceopal’s contribution to high accuracy GNSS services. NAVCAST corrections, which are today broadcasted over the internet, could be in future via satellite constellation (i.e MEO satellites).
Related Reading: Four More Galileo Satellites Brought Online Earlier This Month
Spaceopal GmbH, is a joint venture founded in 2009 by the partners DLR Gesellschaft für Raumfahrtanwendungen (GfR) mbH and Telespazio S.p.A., a Leonardo (67%) and Thales (33%) joint venture.
In December 2016, at the occasion of the Galileo Initial Service Declaration, the European GNSS Agency (GSA) awarded Spaceopal the Galileo Service Operator (GSOp) contract following a competitive tendering process.
As Service Operator of the Galileo system, Spaceopal, together with its partners, is providing high-quality positioning, navigation and timing services in compliance with the Galileo Services performance requirements to the European Commission and users across the world. NAVCAST services are designed to be attractive for centimeter-level positioning applications and do not require additional raw measurements from local reference stations.
Click here for a link to the service.
Precise Point Positioning denotes absolute (i.e. non-differential, phase ambiguity resolving) positioning techniques based on precise satellite orbit and clock information. Most of the PPP techniques combine dual frequency code and phase observations to come up in positioning accuracies at centimeter level. The precision of the satellite orbit and clock information drives the achievable positioning accuracy and convergence time at user level.
