[time-nuts] GPS receiver testing

[Jim Lux]

On 10/31/12 6:17 PM, Tom Van Baak wrote:

> Please read John Plumb's paper:
> http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/ptti2002/paper29.pdf
>
> and Rick Hambly's paper:
> http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/ptti2002/paper9.pdf
>
>

At JPL, most of the calibration and performance testing and such is done 
using an antenna outside with actual signals, rather than a test set 
(although we do have some fancy signal simulators).

Depending on what data you can get out of your receiver, working with 
the GIPSY offline processing system might be useful.  IN a post 
processing sense, you can determine what your receiver *should* have 
been returning.

This morning, I was in a meeting where the JPL GPS folks were talking 
about improving the terrestrial reference frame accuracy from cm scale 
to mm scale over the next few years (and tieing it to celestial 
references as well).  This has to account for all the things like solid 
earth tides, plate movement, etc.