Kinematic solution with RTKPOST

Kinematic solution with RTKPOST

RTKPOST is the GUI tool in RTKLIB to calculate position solutions. Most of the time I find the CUI version (RNX2RTKP) better fits my needs, but just to check everything is working, it is probably easier to use RTKPOST the first time.

For a demonstration of using RTKPOST to find a kinematic position solution, I will use the ZDV1 (COREX station data) for base station data and the “EBAY” (Ublox M8N receiver data) for rover data. Zipped versions of this data is available here. (Update 1/24/20:  This data is no longer available, but similar data can be downloaded from  here.)  Since the exact location of ZDV1 is known and is in the observation file header, the kinematic solution will give us an absolute position by solving for the relative distance between the rover and the base, and then adding that to the base location. I set up the GUI inputs as shown below to point the program to the correct observation and navigation files. If you use my data, be sure to change the paths to match where you saved the data to.

For this first run, to keep things as simple as possible, we will make just two changes from the default setup. Use the “Options” button to get to the options menu. Under the “Setting 1” tab, change “Positioning mode” from “Single” to “Kinematic”. This will give us a differential solution using carrier phase info instead of an absolute solution using only pseudorange. Next, under the “Positions” tab, change the first field under “Base Station” from “Lat/Lon/Height” to RINEX Header Position. This will tell RTKPOST to get the base station location from the header of the observation file.

While you are in the options menu, click the “Save” button, and save the options setup to a location you will remember later. We will use this file as the configuration input file for the CUI version. Then click OK to exit the Options menu.

Click the “Execute” button to calculate position and then “Plot” to see the solution. Select “Gnd Trk” and zoom in and it should look like this. The two rectangles are parking lots. The yellow represents a float solution, the green a fixed solution. The fact that we were able to get a fixed solution at least part of the time is a sign things are working reasonably well.

Zooming into the initial time period when the car was stationary we see the plot below. Since the receiver is not moving during this time, any movement in the solution represents error. During the initial convergence of the kalman filter we see quite a lot of error, but once it does converge, we do get a fixed solution for 5 of the 20 minutes which appears as green in the plot below. During this time you can see the error is roughly +/- 1cm in the xy direction which again is a good sign things are working.

Note about restoring RTKPOST default options:  There is no button in RTKPOST to reset the options to defaults and it remembers the options from the previous session when restarted, so there is no obvious way to put it back to defaults.  The best way I have found to do this is to delete the “rtkpost.ini” file saved in the rtklib\bin folder before starting RTKPOST.