Performance of Precise Point Positioning with Ambiguity Resolution for 1- to 4- hour Observation Periods

Recent progress in integer ambiguity resolution at a single station has made it possible to achieve high positioning accuracy in static precise point positioning (PPP) using a short period of observations. In this paper, 12 stations across Europe are used to conduct short-period (i.e. one, two, three and four hours) static PPP with ambiguity resolution from Day 245 to 251 in 2007. It is demonstrated that, when over three hours of observations are used, PPP can achieve a success rate of 100% for ambiguity resolution, a 3D positioning accuracy of about 1.0 cm and an occurrence of less than 1.0% for degraded solutions. Moreover, for the fixed solutions, increasing the observation period hardly improves the horizontal positioning accuracy while still improving the vertical one. Therefore, it is proposed that at least three hours of observations should be used in the ambiguity-fixed static PPP if a reliable millimetre positioning accuracy is required in the engineering applications.