This is the diary and newspost of the Air Navigation Institute in Switzerland. It contains news about the Institute's activities but also information on other Instrument Flight Procedure Design and Aviation related topics. And it's Beat Zimmermann's platform to distract from daily business once in a while.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
If you ever wondered about GPS accuracy
Recently I adopted an idea from Maurizio, one of the ANI Geodesy teachers, to record some tracks with a GPS receiver in order to illustrate the tracking accuracy on a satellite image. I didn't have my Garmin with me here in Japan, but I have a GPS application called MotionX on my iPhone. So I did some experiments when I was riding a train and a bus on another occasion and recorded the track. I then exported the track into kmz format which can be opened with Google Earth. It is quite amazing: on the picture here, you see the blue track, which is what the GPS thought where I was going, but obviously the bus was driving on the street.
If you click on the picture you will see a larger version of it. What I then did as a little experiment was that I drew the NOMINAL track (the street) and offset it by 2 RNP with RNP = 0.1. This literally represents the containment area in an RNP AR APCH procedure. Now if you remember that I didn't record the track with a receiver that is certified for such operations and has an acceleration sensor that is a bit more sophisticated (I did it with an iPhone in case I haven't mentioned or you forgot... The antenna of the receiver inside a bus, the signal partially shaded by buildings, multipath etc.), the I would say the result is quite nice.
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