BeiDou System (BDS) triple-frequency ambiguity resolution without code measurements

Abstract

Phase and code measurements achieve ambiguity resolution in medium- or long-baseline computation. However, the code multipath effect on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) phase and code measurements is a main source of error for ambiguity resolution, in particular the code multipath. The BeiDou System (BDS) of China is fully operational in the Asia-Pacific region and provides triple-frequency (B1, B2 and B3) measurements. Although previous research about BDS triple-frequency baseline computation indicated that using triple-frequency measurements improves the performance of ambiguity resolution, the respective methods are still impacted by code multipath since the code measurements are incorporated in the methods. Therefore, it is of interest to further improve the ambiguity resolution of BDS triple-frequency baseline computation by excluding the code multipath. We propose a modified phase-only method that only uses triple-frequency phase measurements to achieve BDS ambiguity resolution and evaluate the performance of the method. Observations from experimental medium and long baselines were collected with Trimble NetR9 receivers. The related ambiguity-resolution performances are computed with the phase-only method and a generalized phase-code method. The results show that the phase-only ambiguity resolution is feasible and generally performs better than the phase-code ambiguity resolution, but the improvement is subject to phase noise and satellite geometry.