MEM 201MINE SURVEYING

HOW GPS RECEIVERS WORK

ASSIGNMENT: Read Chapter 13 in the text.

 Brief History of GPS

- Early mariners relied on angular measurements to the sun and stars to determine
their position on Earth.
- 1920s: Radio navigation (allowed navigators to locate direction of shore-based
transmitters when in range).
- 1957: Sputnik satellite launched into space by Russia. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology noted that satellites radio signal increased as it approached ground
and decreased as it left (position could be tracked from the ground).
- 1964: Transit System (2-dimensional system: latitude and longitude) developed
by U.S. Navy. Used by submarines carrying Polaris nuclear missiles. Seven low
altitude satellites circled Earth in polar orbits. Submarine measured Doppler shift
of radio signals to ground-based monitoring stations and could locate its position
within fifteen minutes.
- 1967: Timation System. Used atomic clock.
- 1973: The Navy and Air Force teamed up with the Navigational Technology
Program, which then became the Navigational System with Timing and Ranging
(NAVSTAR). Military evolution of GPS (a 3 dimensional system: latitude,
longitude and altitude, plus GPS time) by Department of Defence to meet military
requirements.
- 1978: first four GPS satellites launched.
- 1994: The rest of the currently existing 24 satellite-constellation launched. Each
now has corresponding receiver on Earth.
 More on History

In the late 1950s, scientists at John Hopkins University developed a way to use radio
signals originating from a satellite in space to provide accurate position updates to
navigation equipment located on the US Navys ships and submarines. By the mid-
1960s, the Air Force initiated a program consisting of several satellites with very
accurate clocks onboard that could give off timing signals of their location in space
which would accurately determine the position of a vehicle moving on land or in the
air. In 1973, the Navy and the Air Force programs combined to form the Navigation
Technology Program, which later evolved into the NAVSTAR Global Positioning
System (GPS) in operation today.
Fundamental research on timing and navigation technology for NAVSTAR was
conducted by the Timation satellite series in the 1960's. There followed four
generations of GPS satellites: the Block I, the Block IIA, the Block IIR, and the
Block IIF. Block I satellites were used to test the principles of the Global Positioning
System, and lessons learned from these 11 satellites were incorporated into later
blocks. Block II, IIA and IIR satellites made up the constellation by the turn of the
century. A total of 28 II/IIAs were put on contract, with the last four tagged as
replacements for earlier satellites reaching the end of their service life. Block IIRs
replaced older Block II/IIAs as they wear out. Block IIF fourth generation satellites
were planned to begin flying in 2005.
The cost to the Air Force in 1973 2000 to develop and procure the GPS satellites
(not including military user equipment or launch costs) was approximately $5.6 billion
in 'Year 2000' dollars. The approximate annual cost to operate and maintain the
constellation, including research and development and procurement of new satellites,
is $750 million.
The GPS worldwide satellite network consists of six monitor stations and four ground
antenna stations. The monitor stations (located at Ascension Island, Cape
Canaveral, Colorado Springs, Diego Garcia, Kwajalein and Hawaii) use specially-
designed GPS receivers to passively track the navigation signals of all of the satellites.
Data from the monitor stations is continually sent to the GPS Master Control Station
(MCS), located at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado, for processing. The MCS
computes precise, updated information on the satellites orbits and clock status every
15 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Updated navigation information is
sent from the MCS to the ground antenna stations (located at Ascension Island, Cape
Canaveral, Diego Garcia and Kwajalein) and then to the satellites. These uploads
are done once or twice per day for each satellite. This is sufficient to maintain the high
accuracy of the GPS constellation.
 Colorado Springs Ascension Island
Hawaii (British Overseas Territory)

Diego Garcia
Cape Canaveral Kwajalein Atoll
(British Indian Ocean Territory)
(Rep. of the Marshall Islands)
By the year 2000 civil users outnumber military users by 100 to 1 and the ratio was
increasing. The Compound Annual Growth Rate of the GPS market was growing by
approximately 22%.
GPS satellites broadcast on two links to users: L1 and L2. L1 is transmitted at a
frequency of 1575.42 MHz, and carries both a Coarse/Acquisition (C/A) ranging code
and a Precise (P(Y)) ranging code. L2 is transmitted at a frequency of 1227.6 MHz
and carries only the P(Y) code. Only the C/A code on L1 was originally available to
all users. The military users have access to both the C/A code on L1 and the P(Y) code
on L1 and L2. To access GPS for general use, a civilian user may purchase a hand-
held or vehicle-mounted GPS receiver. The civil signal is free to all users worldwide.
No subscription, license, fee or registration is required.
The future of plans for GPS included increased power and accuracy, as well as
increased civil navigation safety with the addition of a new civil signal on the L2 link
and a new civil-only signal on a new link, L5, to be broadcast at 1176.45 MHz. A new
military-only signal (M-code) on the L1 and L2 links will be fully operational in 2010.
It will have increased power and reduced vulnerability to signal jamming.
 The Global Positioning System (GPS)

The fundamental concept of GPS is to use simultaneous distance measurements from

four satellites to compute the position and time of any receiver on or above the Earths
surface. The GPS satellites broadcast signals on two different frequencies so that
sophisticated user receivers can correct for distortion effects due to the ionosphere, a
layer of the atmosphere several hundred miles above the Earth. It takes between 65
and 85 milliseconds for a signal to travel from a GPS satellite to a receiver on the
surface of the Earth. The signals are so accurate that time can be figured to much less
than a millionth of a second, velocity can be figured to within a fraction of a km per
hour, and location can be figured to within a few meters. Typical horizontal
positioning accuracy for military users is 7 to 10 meters. Prior to the mid-1990's a
purposely 'degraded signal' was provided for civilian users, limiting their accuracy to
70 to 100 meters. This was eliminated by order of President Clinton as it became
obvious that civilian and commercial users had many unimagined uses for precise
location and timing information as well.
When people talk about "a GPS," they usually mean a GPS receiver. The Global
Positioning System (GPS) is actually a constellation of 27 Earth-orbiting satellites (24
in operation and three extras in case one fails). The U.S. military developed and
implemented this satellite network as a military navigation system, but soon opened it
up to everybody else.

NAVSTAR GPS Satellite

Each of these 3,000- to 4,000-pound solar-powered satellites circles the globe at about
12,000 miles (19,300 km), making two complete rotations every day. The orbits are
arranged so that at any time, anywhere on Earth, there are at least four satellites
"visible" in the sky. A GPS receiver's job is to locate four or more of these satellites,
figure out the distance to each, and use this information to deduce its own location.
This operation is based on a simple mathematical principle called trilateration.
Trilateration in three-dimensional space can be a little tricky, so we'll start with an
explanation of simple two-dimensional trilateration.

GPS Satellite Constellation

 2-D Trilateration

Imagine you are somewhere in the United States and you are TOTALLY lost -- for
whatever reason, you have absolutely no clue where you are. You find a friendly local
and ask, "Where am I?" He says, "You are 625 miles from Boise, Idaho.
This is a nice, hard fact, but it is not particularly useful by itself. You could be
anywhere on a circle around Boise that has a radius of 625 miles, like this:
You ask somebody else where you are, and she says, "You are 690 miles from
Minneapolis, Minnesota." Now you're getting somewhere. If you combine this
information with the Boise information, you have two circles that intersect. You now
know that you must be at one of these two intersection points, if you are 625 miles
from Boise and 690 miles from Minneapolis.
If a third person tells you that you are 615 miles from Tucson, Arizona, you can
eliminate one of the possibilities, because the third circle will only intersect with one
of these points. You now know exactly where you are -- Denver, Colorado.

This same concept works in three-dimensional space, as well, but you're dealing with
spheres instead of circles. In the next section, we'll look at this type of trilateration.
 3-D Trilateration

Fundamentally, three-dimensional trilateration isn't much different from two-

dimensional trilateration, but it's a little trickier to visualize. Imagine the radii from the
examples in the last section going off in all directions. So instead of a series of circles,
you get a series of spheres.
If you know you are 10 miles from satellite A in the sky, you could be anywhere
on the surface of a huge, imaginary sphere with a 10-mile radius. If you also
know you are 15 miles from satellite B, you can overlap the first sphere with
another, larger sphere. The spheres intersect in a perfect circle. If you know the
distance to a third satellite, you get a third sphere, which intersects with this
circle at two points.
The Earth itself can act as a fourth sphere -- only one of the two possible points will
actually be on the surface of the planet, so you can eliminate the one in space.
Receivers generally look to four or more satellites, however, to improve accuracy and
provide precise altitude information.
In order to make this simple calculation, then, the GPS receiver has to know two
things:

The location of at least three satellites above you

The distance between you and each of those satellites

The GPS receiver figures both of these things out by analyzing high-frequency, low-
power radio signals from the GPS satellites. Better units have multiple receivers, so
they can pick up signals from several satellites simultaneously.
Radio waves are electromagnetic energy, which means they travel at the speed of
light (about 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 km per second in a vacuum). The
receiver can figure out how far the signal has traveled by timing how long it took the
signal to arrive.
GPS Triangulation Using 1, 2, and 3 Satellites
 Measuring Distance

A GPS receiver calculates the distance to GPS satellites by timing a signal's journey
from satellite to receiver.
At a particular time (let's say midnight), the satellite begins transmitting a long,
digital pattern called a pseudo-random code. The receiver begins running the same
digital pattern also exactly at midnight. When the satellite's signal reaches the
receiver, its transmission of the pattern will lag a bit behind the receiver's playing of
the pattern.
The length of the delay is equal to the signal's travel time. The receiver multiplies this
time by the speed of light to determine how far the signal traveled. Assuming the
signal traveled in a straight line, this is the distance from receiver to satellite.
In order to make this measurement, the receiver and satellite both need clocks that can
be synchronized down to the nanosecond. To make a satellite positioning system using
only synchronized clocks, you would need to have atomic clocks not only on all the
satellites, but also in the receiver itself. But atomic clocks cost somewhere between
$50,000 and $100,000, which makes them a just a bit too expensive for everyday
consumer use.
The Global Positioning System has a clever, effective solution to this problem. Every
satellite contains an expensive atomic clock, but the receiver itself uses an ordinary
quartz clock, which it constantly resets. In a nutshell, the receiver looks at incoming
signals from four or more satellites and gauges its own inaccuracy.

A GPS Satellite
 Differential GPS

When you measure the distance to four located satellites, you can draw four spheres
that all intersect at one point. Three spheres will intersect even if your numbers are
way off, but four spheres will not intersect at one point if you've measured incorrectly.
Since the receiver makes all its distance measurements using its own built-in clock,
the distances will all be proportionally incorrect.
The receiver can easily calculate the necessary adjustment that will cause the four
spheres to intersect at one point. Based on this, it resets its clock to be in sync with the
satellite's atomic clock. The receiver does this constantly whenever it's on, which
means it is nearly as accurate as the expensive atomic clocks in the satellites.
In order for the distance information to be of any use, the receiver also has to know
where the satellites actually are. This isn't particularly difficult because the satellites
travel in very high and predictable orbits. The GPS receiver simply stores an almanac
that tells it where every satellite should be at any given time. Things like the pull of
the moon and the sun do change the satellites' orbits very slightly, but the Department
of Defense constantly monitors their exact positions and transmits any adjustments to
all GPS receivers as part of the satellites' signals.
This system works pretty well, but inaccuracies do pop up. For one thing, this method
assumes the radio signals will make their way through the atmosphere at a consistent
speed (the speed of light). In fact, the Earth's atmosphere slows the electromagnetic
energy down somewhat, particularly as it goes through the ionosphere and
troposphere. The delay varies depending on where you are on Earth, which means it's
difficult to accurately factor this into the distance calculations. Problems can also
occur when radio signals bounce off large objects, such as skyscrapers, giving a
receiver the impression that a satellite is farther away than it actually is. On top of all
that, satellites sometimes just send out bad almanac data, misreporting their own
position.
Differential GPS (DGPS) helps correct these errors. DGPS can give you positions
accurately to within a meter when moving, and even better in stationary situations.
DGPS works by compensating for errors that creep into normal GPS measurements.
To accomplish this, the DGPS system uses a reference receiver on a point thats been
accurately surveyed (has a known latitude and longitude). This point is known as a
beacon station and here it accepts GPS signals and calculates its latitude and
longitude. The beacon station compares its known location to the one it calculated
from the GPS satellites and the error is the correction factor. The beacon station then
sends out the correction factor so that people using DGPS receivers can identify their
precise location with accuracy of less than 1-2 meters. This calculation and correction
is done and sent instantaneously.
Differential GPS (DGPS) utilizes not only the standard NAVSTAR satellite signal,
but it also incorporates a correction signal that increases accuracy. DGPS has two
main parts: a base station and a mobile (rover) unit, commonly known as a GPS
receiver.
The base station is placed over a precisely surveyed point of known and accepted
coordinates. U.S. Geological Survey benchmarks provide good locations for the base
station. As the NAVSTAR satellites broadcast their signals, both the rover unit and the
base station receive the position data. Since the base station is located over a known
point and is receiving NAVSTAR GPS position data, any deviations from the
actual location can be computed. The assumption is that the error at the base station is
the same as the error at the mobile GPS receiver. The base station then transmits a
correction signal to the mobile GPS unit. The correction signal is used by the DGPS
receiver to correct its own computed geographic location. The results are greater
location accuracy.