Experiment 2 - Site Survey with Global Positioning Systems

Home Up Background knowledge Operation on GPS receiver Site Survey Data Analysis

The main task for global positioning system is time-position acquiring. A wide industrial and commercial area in the world relys on the system nowadays. In cosmic ray telescope project, GPS is used to report precise time for synchronization between different sites. This experiment give you a chance to handle nearly first hand data from GPS. You are required to measure the position for school in this experiment. To complete this experiment, we require a commericial software called WinOncore released by Motorola. This Software is installed in your computer. You can download this software under the URL http://www.motorola.com/ies/GPS/htmls/products/prodwo.html   

In this experiment, you major task is not to understand how to operate the software to obtain your position. The aim of this experiment is to let you understand GPS communication. However, GPS system is complicate. To obtain  time and position, we will rely on the Time Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring algorithm function provided by UT+ receiver to simplify the work. At least, You have to study what can  be done on your UT+ receiver before starting your experiment.

Enter the site to see about the specifications for UT+ receiver http://www.motorola.com/ies/GPS/htmls/products/produt.htm

Part I - Introduction to GPS system and UT+ receiver

Understand the background theory and identifying some technical terms are extremely helpful to perform the experiment. This part may help you to give an minimum understanding on GPS system and UT+ receiver.

Part II - Operation with GPS receiver

In this part,  you will use WinOncore to handle some simple exercises. After finishing the exercise, you will discover that the communication between GPS receiver and computer is completely controlled by the ASCII commands through COMM port. You application software WinOncore is only a wrapper.

Part III - Site survey

In this part, you will do site survey by two approachs. The first one is by automatical site survey function of WinOncore. The second approach is by retrieving the data directly from UT+ recevier and handle it by yourself.

Part IV - Statistical analysis

In this part, you are required to analyse your datum obtain in part III. You should aware that not all informations is useful in your raw datum. You duty is to extract useful informations in a large amount of datum as being handled automatically by WinOncore. At last, compare two results obtained by different approach.