Dual-frequency PPK solutions with RTKLIB and the u-blox F9P

With previous generations of u-blox receivers there has been a lower priced option available without an internal RTK engine, such as the popular M8T in the generation 8 modules. This does not appear to be the case with the new dual-frequency generation 9 modules, as the F9T, without internal RTK solution, is currently priced higher than the F9P with internal solution.

As the u-blox internal RTK solution in the F9P appears to be very robust, there is probably no good reason to ever use RTKLIB for real-time solutions with the F9P. However, it often still makes sense to use RTKLIB to post-process raw data previously collected by the F9P since the F9P is not capable of post-processing solutions.

Post-processed (PPK) solutions have several advantages over real-time solutions. The rover hardware is simpler, less expensive, lighter, and lower power since post-processing does not require a real-time data link between base and rover. Post-processed solutions also tend to be more robust than real-time solutions, both because they are not subject to data dropouts in the base data link and because they allow for solution techniques that take advantage of both past and future observations, not just past observations. When the solution is not required in real-time, it often makes more sense to collect the data first and then process it later.

Collecting data and processing RTK solutions for the dual-frquency F9P with RTKLIB is not very different for doing this for the single-frequency u-blox M8T, and if you are already familiar with doing that, you will probably not have much trouble adapting to the F9P. However, since it’s been a long time since I did a post on this subject, I thought it would be worth going over again with some updated tips for the new receiver.

Step 1: Configuring the receiver:

To process an RTKLIB solution, we will need raw observation messages from both rover and base receivers and navigation data messages from one of the receivers. The receivers do not output these messages by default so we will need to configure them to do this. With the u-blox M8T it was possible to do this directly with RTKLIB using a command file but this is not an option with the F9P as RTKLIB does not currently support the new F9P configuration messages.

Instead we will download the u-blox u-center app and use this to configure the receivers, then save the results to the on-board flash. There are detailed instructions on how to do this in the F9P documentation available on the u-blox website but here’s a quick summary of the process.

1. Plug the receiver into a Windows PC using a USB cable if the board supports USB or with an FTDI serial/USB converter if the receiver only has a UART port.
2. Start the “u-center” app and connect to the receiver with the “Connection” command on the “Receiver” tab. If it is a USB connection, baud rate won’t matter, but if it is a UART->USB connection through FTDI, then you will have to set the correct baud rate from the “Receiver” tab. If all is well, you should see the green connection indicator flashing at the bottom of the screen
3. From the “View” tab, open the “Messages”, Configure”, “Gen 9 Configure”, and “Packet Console” windows
4. If using the UART port, click on “PRT (Ports)” from the “Configure” window, set the Target to “1-UART1” and “Baudrate” to the desired baud rate, and click on “Send”. I typically set this to 115200 baud. You will then need to change the baud rate in u-center to the new baud rate. If you are using the USB port directly, you can skip this step.
5. From the “Configure” window, click on “RATE”, and set “Measurement Period” to the desired time between observation samples, then click on “Send”. I typically set this to 200 ms which gives a 5 Hz sample rate.
6. From the “Gen 9 Configure” window, select “GNSS Configuration”, enable the desired constellations and signals, select “RAM” and “Flash” under “Layer Selection”, then click on “Send Configuration”. The F9P supports GPS L1C/A and L2C, Glonass L1 and L2, Galileo E1 and E5b, BediDou B1 and B2, and QZSS L1C/A.
7. From the “Messages” window, right click on “NMEA” and then click on “Disable Child Messages” to disable all the NMEA messages. None of these are needed for an RTK solution but if you want any of the messages for other reasons you can then individually enable the ones you need.
8. From the “Messages” window, double click on “UBX” then “RXM”. Right click and enable “RAWX” to enable raw observation messages and “SFRBX” to enable navigation messages. Alternatively, you can enable the RTCM3 messages from the “Gen 9 Configure” window. In this case you will want to enable the 1077,1087,1097,and 1127 messages. I have occasionally had trouble enabling the RTCM3 messages on the F9P and have had to use the “Revert to default configuration” option under the “CFG” command first to get this working.
9. If an antenna is connected to the receiver and is not completely blocked, verify that you see RAWX and SFRBX messages appear in the “Packet” window.
10. From the “Configure” window, select “CFG”, then “Save current configuration” then “Send” to save these settings to the flash on-board the F9P module.
11. Repeat this procedure for the base receiver except set the “Measurement Period” under “RATE” to “1000 ms” for a 1 Hz sample rate. You will only need one set of navigation data so you can choose not to enable the SFRBX messages on the base. I tend to leave them enabled just because it makes plotting slightly easier later if each set of observations has its own navigation data.

If you have any trouble with the above summary, you might find this YouTube video from Robo Roby useful. It is intended for setting up the F9P for real-time solutions, not post-processing, but there is a lot of overlap between the two.

In the descriptions below STRSVR, RTKCONV, RTKPLOT, and RTKPOST are all RTKLIB GUI apps. They can be opened individually or you can start by opening RTKLAUNCH and run the individual apps from there. I do not believe the official 2.4.2 or 2.4.3 versions of RTKLIB fully support the F9P receiver yet so I would recommend using the demo5 version of RTKLIB available here.

RTKLAUNCH used to open the different RTKLIB apps

Step 2: Collecting the data:

1. For this exercise I will connect both base and rover directly to a Windows PC through the USB port. You can connect both receivers to one PC or each to a separate PC.
2. Launch two instances of STRSVR, one for each receiver
3. Set the input stream to “Serial”, click on the input “Opt” button and set the port and baud rate. Set the output stream to file and click on the output “Opt” to set the file name. Click on the “?” to get a list of keyword replacements for the file name. I like to add “_%h%M” to the end of the file name which will append the hour and minute of the data to the file name. If you are collecting long data sets you might want to set the “Swap Intv” to break up the data into manageable file sizes. Note that you will need to use the keywords in this case to avoid overwriting the same file repeatedly. Give the file name a “.ubx” extension to let RTKLIB know that it is u-blox binary data.
4. Click “Start” to start collecting data.

STRSVR used to collect the raw data

Step 3: Convert the observation data to rinex format:

1. Start the RTKCONV app
2. Click on the “…” button to the right of the “RTCM, RCV RAW or RINEX OBS” field and select the observation file created in the previous step.
3. If the file extension is not “.ubx” set the “Format” to “u-blox”, otherwise leave as “Auto”
4. Click on the “Options” button and select “L1”, “L2/E5b”, and all GNSS constellations collected (usually “GPS”,”GLO”,”GAL”, and possibly “BDS” (Bediou) depending on your location. Then close the options menu.
5. Click on “Convert” to convert from binary to rinex format.

RTKCONV used to convert the raw data from binary format to rinex text format

Step 4: Review the observation data:

1. Before processing the solution, it is a good idea to look at the data first and make sure it is complete, of reasonable quality, and at the right sample rate.
2. From the RTKCONV main window, click on “Plot” to plot the observations you just converted.
3. Verify there are observations from all constellations. Green indicates dual frequency measurements, yellow is single frequency. The GPS observations will be a mix of single and dual frequency since only about half of the satellites currently support L2C used by the F9P, but the other constellations should be nearly all dual frequency.
4. Red ticks indicate cycle slips. Too many of these will make it difficult to get a decent solution. Gaps in the data usually indicate the receiver lost lock and these are not good unless they are in the low elevation satellites.
5. If all the satellites are in gray, this usually indicates you are missing the navigation data. The previous step should have generated a “.nav” file as well as a “.obs” file. If just a few satellites are in gray, this normally indicates that they are below the elevation threshold which can be adjusted in the options menu selected in the top right corner with the star-like icon.
6. Check both rover and base observations.
7. In some cases you may only have one set of navigation data and so not have a matching “.nav” file for one of your observation files. In that case you can manually specify the navigation data with the “Open Nav Data…” option in the “File” tab.

Plot of raw observations

Step 5: Generate the position solution

1. Open RTKPOST
2. From the “…” buttons on the right hand side of the GUI, select the rover observation file, the base observation file, and the navigation file as shown in the example below.
3. Click on the “Options” button and then the “Load” button. Select the “demo5_m8t_5hz.conf” file from the same folder as the demo5 RTKLIB executables, and then click on “Open”
4. From the “Setting1” tab in the “Options” menu, enable “Galileo” and if applicable “Bediou”. “GPS” and “GLO” should already be enabled.
5. From the “Setting2” tab in the “Options” menu, set “Integer Ambiguity Res (GLO)” to “On”. We are able to use the “On” setting in this case because the receivers are identical and so the Glonass hardware biases cancel. If you are not using an F9P receiver for base, then leave this field set to “Fix-and-Hold” which will automatically calibrate out the biases.
6. From the “Setting1” tab in the “Options” menu, change the “Frequencies” from “L1” to “L1+L2”. This is the only change you should need to make to switch from processing single-frequency data to dual-frequency data for the F9P. The Galileo second frequency for the F9P is actually E5b not L2 but to simplify and improve the processing speed, I have modified the demo5 code to include “E5b” processing as Galileo’s second frequency. This won’t be the case for the 2.4.2 or 2.4.3 code. I don’t believe it’s currently possible to include the E5b data with these versions of RTKLIB but if I’m wrong please let me know
7. Click on “OK” to close the Options menu.
8. Click on “Execute” to run the solution. The bar at the bottom of the GUI will show the solution status as it runs and will report any errors. You should see a mix of Q=1 and Q=2 as the solution runs. If you see only Q=0, something is wrong. In this case, open the “Options” window, select the “Output” tab and set “Output Debug Trace” to “Level3”, exit the Options menu, and rerun the solution. Then open the “.trace” file in the solution folder for additional information on what went wrong.
9. Click on “Plot” to plot the solution with RTKPLOT

RTKPOST used to generate a PPK solution

Plot RTKPOST generated PPK solution

This was just meant to be a quick summary of the process. For more details please see the references below.

References:

1. u-center User Guide
2. u-blox F9P Interface Description
3. RTKLIB manual
4. Updated guide to the RTKLIB configuration file

A few simple debugging tips for RTKLIB

Unfortunately, error reporting is not one of RTKLIB’s strengths.  Sometimes it will halt with an error message that is less than helpful, other times it will just continue through the entire solution with Q=0 or Q=2 without ever getting a fix because of a minor error in the input file configuration or parameters. I suspect anyone who has used RTKLIB with any regularity has run into cases like this innumerable times. It still happens to me all the time, almost always because I have made a silly mistake somewhere. For a new RTKLIB user, it can be quite difficult to figure out why they are not getting a valid solution in cases like this.

In this post, I will demonstrate some examples of common errors and some techniques to help identify them. First let’s take a quick look at a couple of real-time solution examples with RTKNAVI, then I will jump to post-processing cases for the rest of the examples.

In my experience, the most common error when using RTKNAVI is to improperly specify the base location. To demonstrate this, I go to the “Positions” tab on the “Options” menu in RTKNAVI and switch the Base Station position type from “Average of Single Position” to “RTCM Position”. In this example, my base stream is u-blox binary and contains no RTCM messages so RTKLIB will not get any valid base location information and can not calculate a solution. However, rather than halting and letting the user know there is a problem, RTKNAVI just runs through the whole solution without ever reporting either an error or a valid position. To help understand what happened in a case like this, the first step is to click on the tiny unlabeled square above the “Start/Stop” button. This will bring up the RTK Monitor window. Choose “Error/Warning” from the Monitor options as shown in the image below to bring up additional error and warning information.

In this case, every sample reports an “initial base station position error”. This should be enough information to track down the problem fairly quickly. Often this will be the case. If the additional information in this window doesn’t help, then the next step is to enable the debug trace and look at the trace file. This is covered in more detail in the post-processing examples further below.

In my experience, the second most common reason to get no solution with RTKNAVI is that navigation messages haven’t been enabled for either base or rover receiver. If this is the case, then all the SNR bars will be gray. When navigation data is available, the bars will be colored as in the image above. Lack of SNR bar color is the easiest way to detect this problem but another symptom is that the “Error/Warning” window will report “No common satellites” for every sample even though satellites are appearing in the SNR window.

A more general troubleshooting technique that will work for either real-time or post-processing and for GUI or command line RTKLIB applications is the debug trace file. I will demonstrate a couple of examples of using this with RTKPOST but the same basic technique can also be used with RTKNAVI, RNX2RTKOP, RTKCONV, CONVBIN, or STRSVR.

To enable the debug trace, set “Output Debug Trace” in the “Options” menu to something other than “OFF”. For simple errors, level 2 is enough and will produce a less overwhelming amount of information. For more detailed information about the GNSS solution, especially the ambiguity resolution, level 3 is better. For more details about the communication streams, level 4 can be useful. Level 5 includes many of the solution matrices and is too detailed for most general debug. Level 1 only contains the error messages available in the error window and is not useful. The image below from the RTKPOST Options menu shows the trace level set to 3. I usually set it to level 3 since I am often looking at the details of the ambiguity resolution, but for simple debug I would recommend starting with level 2 and that is what I will use in the examples below.

Next, I will intentionally make some silly mistakes and show how they appear in the error window and the trace file.

Let’s start with an example where RTKPOST actually does a good job of reporting the error to demonstrate how it should work, and occasionally does. To keep the example simple I will use files in the root directory, with names: rover.obs, base.obs, and rover.nav.

In this first case, I have made a typo in the name of the .nav file. Now, when I click on “Execute” to start the solution, it almost immediately halts and reports “Error: no nav data” in the error window near the bottom of the window. If only RTKLIB would always be as straightforward as this!

Next, I intentionally make a typo in the rover observation file and click on “Execute”. Again, the solution halts almost immediately but in this case the error message in the error window is much less useful. Not only does it not tell me which file has a problem, but it also suggests there is something specific wrong with the input data, not that the file is completely missing. Fortunately, clicking on another tiny unlabeled square (circled in red below) brings up the trace file, assuming trace debug was enabled as described above. This tells us exactly what went wrong, that the input rover observation file could not be opened.

For the next example, I will correct the typo in the file name but then set the location in the base rinex file header to all zeros. This is another common problem and usually happens because the rinex file was generated by RTKCONV or other application from a binary receiver output file that did not contain navigation messages. Without navigation information, RTKCONV can not estimate the receiver location and sets the approximate position field in the rinex header to all zeros. Again, the solution halts almost immediately, and the error message is identical to the previous case. However, looking at the trace file, there is now no mention of a file open error. To understand the difference between these two trace files, it’s important to know that the entries in the trace file beginning with 2 are warnings, and those beginning with 1 are errors. RTKLIB treats the missing file as a warning since there may be other observation files that are present, and doesn’t get an actual error until it looks for the base position information. With just the error, it is impossible to tell these two case apart, but by looking at the warnings as well, it is fairly easy to differentiate them.

Another fairly common error is to use the wrong base observation file. If the base observations do not overlap the rover observations in time, then the solution will run all the way through the data, without error, but the solution status will always be Q=0. Here’s the trace output for this example. I aborted the run before it completed, after it was obvious that something is wrong which is why the error windows shows “aborted”. The “age of differential” is the time between rover observation and closest base observation so again in this case, looking at the trace file makes the problem much more obvious

If the wrong navigation file is used, the solution will again run to the end with no error, and the status will remain Q=0, just as above, but this time the trace file will report “no common satellites”

Another mistake I make fairly often, is when I am specifying the precise base location rather than using the approximate location in the rinex header, and I forget to change it when moving to a different data set with a different base location. In this case, the solution will run without error, but the fix status will remain in float (Q=2) for the entire solution. There are several reasons why you might never get a fix, including just poor quality data, but in this case when I look at the trace file I see extremely large outliers right from the first sample. If all the satellites are reporting outliers and they are as large as this, that almost always means that the base location has been specified incorrectly.

These are only a few examples but probably cover over 80% of cases I look at where people are unable to get a solution. Most of the rest are caused by low quality data.

If you have other examples of common failures that I haven’t covered here, please describe them in a comment, along with the signature seen in the trace file.

Event logging with RTKLIB and the u-blox M8T receiver

Event logging is a nice feature that has been available in the Emlid version of RTKLIB for a long time.  In the latest version of the demo5 code (b29e), I have ported this feature from their open-source code repository.  Their version is specifically for the u-blox M8T receiver but I have extended it to support the Swiftnav receiver as well.  I mentioned this feature in my previous post and had a couple requests for more information, hence this post.

Both the u-blox and Swiftnav receivers have hardware/firmware to capture the precise time an external pin changes state and send out a binary message with this information.  The RTKLIB event logging code decodes these messages and logs the events to the rinex file.  The events in the rinex file are then used in post-processing to generate a position log containing an interpolated position for each timing event. The most popular use for this feature is probably to record camera shutter times but it can also be used for other purposes such as marking survey locations in the data stream.

Here is an example of a drone flight from a data set containing events that I downloaded from the Emlid forum.  On the left is the ground track of the standard position solution plotted with RTKPLOT.  It includes one point for every rover observation epoch.  On the right is a plot of the event positions from the new event position file.  In this case there is one point for every event which gives precise locations for each camera image.  This is very useful information when processing the images.

Here are the positions of the two plotted on top of each other, green dots are the rover observation epochs from the position file and the blue dots are the events from the event position file.  As you can see from the plot, the event positions are interpolated from the observation epochs.

 

There is information in the Emlid and Swiftnav documentation on how to connect an external trigger to their hardware so I won’t cover that here.

Instead, I will go through an example using an M8T receiver from CSGShop.  I will also use this example to try and validate this feature since there has been some discussion on the Emlid forum about potential issues that as far as I can tell have not been completely resolved on the forum.

The CSGShop M8T receiver comes in several variations.  To use event logging you will need to choose a board that provides access to the external interrupt pins.  You can use either EXINT0 or EXINT1.  For this experiment I also use the TIMEPULSE pin to provide triggers for the event logging.  Here is an image of the receiver and the interface pins.

The goal of this experiment is to generate events for which I know their precise timing so I can use them to validate the RTKLIB event logging results.  To do this, I configured the M8T TIMEPULSE output for a period of two seconds and a falling edge that occurs at 0.2 seconds, all in GPST time.  I then connected the TIMEPULSE output pin to the EXTINT1 input pin so that each state change of the output pulse will be recorded as an event.  Although the M8T will record both rising edges and falling edges, RTKLIB is setup to record only the falling edges.

To configure the timing pulse, I used the u-blox u-center app to setup the UBX-CFG-TP5 command as shown below.

I then enabled the UBX-TIM-TM2 messages which the receiver uses to output the event information.  Next, I opened the table view in u-center and configured it to log GPS time, and the rise and fall times for EXTINT1.  This information is extracted from GPRMC and TIM-TM2 messages.  As you can see the falling edges of the pulse are occurring at exactly 0.2 seconds on the even seconds in GPS time so it looks like we have correctly configured the output pulse

Now that I have external events occurring at precisely known times, I can use these to test the RTKLIB code.   The u-blox example command files that I include with the demo5 executables already are setup to enable the UBX-TIM-TM2 messages, so there is no need to make any changes there.

The next step is to collect some base and rover data using the modified receiver as rover.  I did that, and then converted the raw .ubx files to rinex using the new demo5 version of RTKCONV.  The events appear with a time stamp followed by a 5 in the next field to indicate an external event as shown below.  The zero in the last field indicates it is a valid time mark.

The observation epochs are occurring every second, so notice that the event is being logged out of sequence with a one sample delay.  I did not see this with the Emlid data set example described above.  However, I do see the same delay  if I use the Emlid code to convert the binary file instead of my code.  I don’t know if the Emlid hardware has somehow been configured to avoid this sequencing issue or whether it can occur on the Emlid hardware as well.  I’ll get back to this in a minute.

Next I ran RTKPOST to calculate a position solution.  With the new code changes, a *.events.pos file is generated in addition to the *.pos file.  It is the same format as the *.pos file but contains the event positions instead of the observation epoch positions.  Note, that it will be generated for absolute solutions (XYZ,LLH) LLH but not for relative (ENU) solutions.

I first did this with the Emlid code and got the following result when plotting both the position file and event position file.

The events are occurring at the correct times, but note that unlike the previous example, the positions are not being correctly interpolated between the two closest observation epochs.  In fact, if you look carefully you will see they are being extrapolated from the two previous observation epochs.  This is most obvious in the N-S axis points and is occurring because the events are being logged out of sequence.

To fix this, I modified the interpolation code to use the nearest observation epochs even when the event logging was delayed by one sample.  Here is the result using the latest demo5 b30 code.

Looking at the time stamps from the position log and the event position log, shown below, you can see that the observation epochs are occurring on the integer seconds and the events are occurring 0.2 seconds later on the even seconds, all in GPST time, just as we set them up to occur and verified with u-center.

So I don’t fully understand why the time stamps are appearing out of sequence with the CSGShop M8T data and not in the Emlid M8T data.  It may be that Emlid has configured the hardware somehow so this can not happen.  If this is true, then there should be no issue using the Emlid RTKLIB code with Emlid data but be careful using it with data from other hardware.  If anybody has any additional insight into this discrepancy please leave a comment.

I should also mention that all these code changes are in the core code so are present in both the command line apps as well as the GUI apps.  The most recent demo5 executables (b29e) do not contain the fix for interpolating delayed events and will function the same as the Emlid code.  The Github respository does have this fix.  The fix will also be in the demo5 b30 executables which I hope to release soon.

Glonass Ambiguity Resolution with RTKLIB Revisited

To get a high precision fixed solution in RTKLIB we need to resolve the integer ambiguities that come from the carrier phase measurements.  Resolving the integer ambiguities for the GLONASS satellites is more challenging than resolving them for the other constellations.  This is because, unlike the other constellations, the GLONASS satellites all transmit on slightly different frequencies.  This introduces an additional bias error in the receiver hardware.

These hardware biases are constant, generally the same for all receivers from the same manufacturer, are proportional to carrier frequency and are similar between L1 and L2.

In the demo5 version of RTKLIB, there are four choices for how to handle GLONASS ambiguity resolution (AR). I will cover all four briefly, but then focus on the “autocal” setting which I have enhanced in the most recent version (b29c) of the demo5 code.

Off:  If Glonass  AR is set to “Off”, then the raw measurements from the Glonass satellites will be used for the float solution but ambiguity resolution will be done only with satellites from the other constellations.  If you are not using the demo5 version of RTKLIB, this is usually your only choice when using receivers from different manufacturers for the rover and the base.  However, you are giving up a significant amount of information by ignoring the GLONASS ambiguities and so I would not recommend this setting if you are using the demo5 code, unless of course your receivers don’t support the Glonass satellites.

On:  If Glonass AR is set to “On” then RTKLIB will treat the Glonass ambiguities the same as the ambiguities from the other constellations and will not make any attempt to account for the additional hardware biases.  Use this setting if your base and rover receivers are from the same manufacturer, since in this case, the biases will cancel and can be ignored.  There are also some cases in which different manufacturers have equal or nearly equal biases as we will see later, in which case you can also use this setting.  This is your best solution for dealing with Glonass ambiguities.  I always try to use matched receivers for base and rover if possible.

Fix-and-Hold: This is an option I have added to the demo5 code for Glonass AR.  It is an extension to the “fix-and-hold” method used for other constellations but instead of using the additional feedback to track the ambiguities, it uses it to null out the hardware biases.  I recommend this setting when using the demo5 code with unmatched receivers.  It takes advantage of the additional information in the Glonass ambiguites most of the time.  However, fix-and-hold is not enabled until after a first fix has been achieved, and so the Glonass ambiguities are not available until then.  This can mean longer time to first fix and less robustness compared to the “On” option, so don’t use this option for matched receivers.

Auto-cal:  This option adds additional states to the kalman filter to estimate the receiver hardware biases as a function of carrier frequency, one state for L1, another for L2.  In previous experiments I had not had any success with it.  Recently, however, I discovered that if I adjusted the filter settings, it can be effective for a zero baseline case, where base and rover are both connected to the same antenna so that almost all other errors are completely cancelled.  With a little more experimentation I also found that for short baselines it can also be effective if the kalman filter state is pre-set to something close to the final value before the solution is started.  It will then usually converge to the correct bias value.  However, there is currently no mechanism in the code to adjust any of these values, so I have not found this mode to be useful in its current implementation.

To make the auto-cal option more flexible, and hopefully more useful, I made a few modifications to it in the b29c code.  I added the capability to pre-set the initial state value and also to adjust the internal filter settings, specifically the initial variance and process noise for this state.  The units for the state, and hence for the initial value are in meters per frequency channel and values generally are within +/-5 cm per channel.  I used some existing config parameters that are currently unused to reduce the amount of code I needed to change.  Unfortunately it means that the names are not as descriptive as they could be.  The new config parameters are:

pos2-arthres2 = relative GLONASS hardware bias in meters per frequency slot
pos2-arthres3 = initial variance of GLONASS hardware bias states
pos-arthres4 = process noise for GLONASS hardware bias states

Bias values have been published for some of the most popular geodetic quality receivers but are generally not available for lower-cost or less popular receivers.  Here is a table of values from a paper published by Lambert Wanninger in 2011 for nine receiver manufacturers.

I was able to verify these results for Trimble, Leica, and Novatel, but I found a much lower value for Septentrio so I suspect the biases may have changed in their newer receivers.

To demonstrate the modified autocal option, I will start with a zero baseline case between a ComNav receiver and a Tersus receiver.  It is easiest to measure the hardware biases in the zero baseline case because most other errors will cancel and the hardware biases will be the dominant error.  In this case, I have significantly reduced the initial variance setting from the original value of 1.0 to 1E-7 and increased the process noise from 1E-6 to 1E-3.

I have run the solution several times with the initial bias value set to different numbers between -.05 and 0.06.  Here are the results for both L1 and L2.

The convergence occurs just after first fix is achieved.  If a fix is not achieved, then the state will not converge as you can see above for the 0.06 example.   In this case, the initial value was too far from the correct value and prevented getting a fix.  As you can see, all the other cases converged towards a single value around -.022, both for L1 and for L2.

Another way to visualize the error in the initial value is to look at the GLONASS residuals after first fix is achieved.  The plot below shows the GLONASS L1 carrier phase residuals  for different initial values, for 0.03 on the left, -0.05 in the middle, and what I believe is the correct value for this receiver combination of -.022 on the right.

Here are the same plots for the L2 carrier phase residuals.

Through a slightly tedious process, I am fairly easily able to iterate the residuals down to near zero for different pairs of receivers in my possession.  Note that this gives me the relative difference in biases for each receiver pair, and not absolute values for each receiver, unlike Wanniger’s table which is for absolute biases.

Extending the table to receivers used in nearby CORS stations is a little more challenging because the initial bias value needs to be fairly close to get a first fix and hence a convergence, but still possible if the base station is not too distant.   I found data sets that included CORS data from Leica, Novatel, Trimble, and Septentrio receivers.  Using the above procedure to iterate the residuals down to near zero, I was then able to extend my table and make the values absolute by choosing the unknown offset to make my bias pairs align with Wanninger’s table.  This is the resulting table I created.

[Note: table updated 3/16/20:]

ComNav               =   2.3 cm
Leica                      =   2.3 cm
Novatel                 =  2.3 cm
Septentrio           = -0.3 cm
Spectra Physics =  0.0 cm
SwiftNav              =  0.0 cm
Tersus                   =  0.0 cm
Topcon                 =  0.0 cm
Trimble                = -0.7 cm
u-blox M8T        = -3.2 cm
u-blox F9P          =  0.0 cm

To generate an initial value for the bias state from this table for an RTKLIB solution, subtract the base station bias from the rover bias, then divide by 100 to convert from centimeters to meters.  This value can then be used to set the “pos2-arthres2” config parameter in the config file.  For the RTKPOST and RTKNAVI GUI option menus I have labeled this “Glo HW Bias”.

To test this code on an independent set of data after generating the table, I used a data set recently sent to me by a reader.  It consists of a u-blox  M8T receiver for rover and Leica receiver just a few kilometers away for base, and was collected in Europe.  The rover position was static but I ran the solution in kinematic mode to make the solution a little more challenging and to make any errors in the solution more visible.

To generate the correct config value for RTKLIB I  subtracted the Leica bias of 2.3 cm from the above table from the u-blox bias of -3.2 cm to get a relative bias between receivers of -5.5 cm or -0.055 m.  I added “pos2-arthres2=-0.055” to the config file and then ran the solution four times, with pos2-gloarmode set to “off”,”fix-and-hold”,”autocal”, and “on”.  Although I left the bias value set for all runs it is ignored unless gloarmode is set to autocal.

Here are the times to first fix, the number of satellite pairs used for the initial fix, and the number of satellite pairs being used for fix after 10 minutes.

	Time to	# sat pairs used	# sat pairs used for
GLO AR mode	first fix	for initial fix	fix after 10 min
OFF	4:10	7	7
Fix&Hold	4:10	7	11
Autocal	1:05	14	14
On	6:47	14	14

As you would expect, the time to first fix for gloarmode=”off” was the same as “fix-and-hold” since “fix-and-hold” does not use the GLONASS satellites for initial fix.  After 10 minutes it was still only including four of the GLONASS satellites in the ambiguity resolution which was a little unusual, typically I would have expected more GLONASS satellites to be included.

With gloarmode=”autocal”, the time to first fix was reduced from 250 seconds to 65 seconds and the number of satellites included in the first fix increased from 7 to 14., both significant improvements.

The most surprising thing in this data is that when gloarmode was set to “on” it acquired a fix at all.  In many similar cases it will never get a fix.  The GLONASS carrier phase residuals after initial fix were very high though as can be seen below.  The left plot is with gloarmode set to “on”, and the right plot is with it set to “autocal”.

The ambiguity resolution ratio was also much higher when autocal was enabled as can be seen below (yellow/green=autocal, olive/blue=on) which improves robustness.

The large residuals did not affect the solution position, as the two solution did not differ by more than 2 mm at any time.  The autocal solution however is much more robust in the sense that it is less likely to lose fix.

Although I have found the results with autocal enabled are generally excellent with relatively short baselines (<10 km), I have found the results less encouraging for longer baselines (>25 km).  In these case I have found that I often get better results with pos-gloarmode set to “fix-and-hold” then I do with “autocal”.  I don’t understand exactly why this is, but suspect that the fix-and-hold correction is more general and may be correcting for more than just the GLONASS hardware biases.

The code changes for this feature are included both in my Github repository and in the newest (demo5 b29c) executables available to download from the rtkexplorer website.   If you choose to experiment with this feature, please let me know if you find any errors in my table, or can add values for any additional receivers.

[Note 6/17/18:  I had a issue with uploading the executables to the website.   If you downloaded them prior to 6/17/18, please download again to get the updated version.] 

Update to RTKLIB config file recommendations

I’ve just updated my “RTKLIB: Customizing the input configuration file” post from a few months ago with information on all of the new config parameters I have added to the demo5 code up through B26B.  I’ve also added more notes to some of the existing features based on my more recent experiences.

Demo5 code features

I’ve had a couple questions about what’s different between my demo5 code and the 2.4.3 release code. Here’s a list of what I think are the significant differences.  Any changes that I have made but have then been ported back to the release code are not included here.

 1 Calculation of GPS Solution (RTKNAVI, RTKPOST, RNX2RTKP)

1.1 Significant Functional Differences

(1) The kalman filter state update has been re-written to remove all the zero-element multiplies. This significantly reduces the computation time when receiver dynamics is enabled.

(2) Code has been added to calibrate and manage inter-channel biases for the GLONASS and SBAS satellites based on an extension of the fix-and-hold method (direct feedback from the ambiguity resolution results to the kalman filter states).  This enables use of the GLONASS and SBAS satellites for ambiguity resolution with the M8N receiver or when the base and rover receivers are not identical.

(3) Integer ambiguity resolution has been enhanced to include up to three attempts per sample to resolve the ambiguities using different combinations of satellites. Additional attempts may remove GLONASS and SBAS satellites and/or remove newly acquired satellites depending on various conditions.

(4) Additional adjustable constraints for ambiguity resolution have been added to help minimize the chance of false fixes.

(5) The common component of the phase-biases has been moved to a separate variable instead of spreading it out among all the satellites. This makes the phase-bias states easier to interpret during debug and also removes some issues with improper adding of cycles from satellites with different carrier wavelengths.

(6) Comments have been added to most of the core positioning algorithm code.

(7) The trace output has been enhanced and modified to provide more relevant information for debugging poor solutions.

1.2 Additional Input Parameters and Options

(1) pos1-posmode = static-start: Begins solution in “static” mode but switches to “kinematic” mode after first fix. This mode will normally acquire first fix faster than kinematic mode if the rover is stationary but will fail if the rover starts moving before the first fix.

(2) pos2-gloarmode = fix-and-hold: Extends the fix-and-hold method to calibrate the inter-channel biases for the GLONASS satellites and similar errors for the SBAS satellites. Note that fix-and-hold feedback only occurs after the first fix.

(3) pos2-arfilter = on,off: Rejects new or recovered satellites from being used in ambiguity resolution if the AR ratio was significantly degraded by their addition. This is an alternative or enhancement to using the blind delay of “arlockcnt” since the satellite will only be left out of the solution as long as necessary instead of for a fixed length of time.

(4) pos2-arthres1 = x: Integer ambiguity resolution is delayed until the variance of the position state has reached this threshold. It is intended to avoid false fixes before the kalman filter has had time to converge. If you see AR ratios of zero extending too far into your solution, you may need to increase this value. The “arthres1” option exists in the release code config file but is not used for anything.

(5) pos2-minfixsats = n: Minimum number of sats necessary to get a fix. Used to avoid false fixes from a very small number of satellites, especially during periods of frequent cycle-slips.

(6) pos2-minholdsats = n: Minimum number of sats necessary to hold an integer ambiguity result. Used to avoid false holds from a very small number of satellites, especially during periods of frequent cycle-slips.

 

2 Conversion from raw data to RINEX (RTKCONV, CONVBIN, RTKNAVI)

2.1 Significant Functional Differences

(1) The M8T raw output to cycle-slip translation algorithm has been modified to more closely match that of the M8N. This insures that a cycle-slip is flagged after every loss-of-lock and is not flagged until the carrier phase measurement quality is sufficient for resetting the phase-bias estimate.

(2) The half-cycle invalid bit is set for the SBAS satellites based on lock-time since the half-cycle invalid bit from the receiver is not functional for these satellites. This change has been made for both the M8N and M8T in the demo5 code but has only been ported back to the 2.4.3 code for the M8N receiver.

(3) The receiver measurement quality metrics for each sample are recorded in the RINEX observation files. The single character SNR field in the pseudorange and carrier-phase measurements are used for this purpose. The M8T reports quality metrics for both pseudorange and carrier-phase, the M8N reports quality metrics only for the carrier-phase. This is for information purposes only, RTKLIB does not use these fields.

2.2 Receiver Specific Options (U-blox)

(1) -STD_SLIP = x: Carrier phase measurements are flagged as cycle-slips if the standard deviation of the carrier phase measurement (as reported by the receiver) is greater or equal to x (scale=0.04 meters/count). This feature now exists in both  the 2.4.3 and the demo5 codes but is not listed in the 2.4.3 documentation. It is only used for the M8T receiver. If this option is not set, then the same fixed threshold will be used for cycle-slips as for valid carrier-phase measurements, which in the release code can cause cycle-slips to fail to be flagged after the phase-bias estimate is valid.

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.