Enhancements to Fugro Marinestar's GNSS precise point positioning service planned for 2024
In 2024, Fugro's Marinestar Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Precise Point Positioning (PPP) service has undergone significant enhancements, aiming to improve performance across multiple key areas. These advancements make the service more robust, precise, and secure, catering to industries such as marine surveying, offshore construction, autonomous vessels, and other critical navigation-dependent operations.
One of the key improvements is faster convergence, enabling users to achieve precise positioning faster than before. This reduction in wait time typically associated with PPP initialization and processing makes the service more efficient for time-sensitive applications.
The service has also been upgraded to provide enhanced positioning accuracy. Improvements in satellite data processing algorithms and refined error modeling contribute to more precise and reliable positioning outputs, supporting applications that demand high precision.
Marinestar has incorporated advanced scintillation mitigation techniques to better handle ionospheric disturbances, especially under challenging conditions like equatorial regions or geomagnetic storms. This enhancement reduces the impact of signal fluctuations caused by ionospheric irregularities, maintaining service reliability and accuracy.
To enhance security and trustworthiness, the service now includes robust anti-spoofing measures that detect and mitigate attempts to deceive GNSS receivers with counterfeit signals. This improvement strengthens the integrity of the positioning data against malicious interference.
In 2024, corrections for Galileo were added to the service, improving its robustness against local radio interference and ionospheric scintillation. Additionally, the largest improvement in scintillation handling involves the addition of BeiDou3 with 36 nominal satellites in 2023, increasing the used GNSS satellites from 30 to 40.
Fugro has also added Satguard® to the timing service, achieving a precision of 1 nanosecond. This is used in timing operations to prevent time spoofing. Furthermore, Fugro has introduced the authentication service Satguard®, which can distinguish fake and true signals from the four constellations, preventing the injection of fake signals into the PPP engine and ensuring accurate positioning for clients.
A significant improvement in 2024 involves the addition of third-frequency phase biases and inter-frequency code biases of Galileo and BeiDou for the Integer Ambiguity resolution to the existing dual-frequency service. This enhancement contributes to even higher accuracy, reaching 1.5 cm horizontally and 3.5 cm vertically (95 %), with almost instantaneous convergence (within one minute) in many ideal experimental sites.
Marinestar is one of the services that provides precise orbit, clock, and phase bias corrections of satellites to marine clients. The service enables precise point positioning (PPP) with integer ambiguity resolution (IAR) without using reference stations nearby. The reference network consists of 130 reference stations with Trimble NetR5, NetR9, Alloy, and Septentrio PolaRx5 GNSS receivers.
The NMEA GGA Station ID is used to show the state of the receiver. The 2024 enhancements to Fugro's GNSS PPP service have significantly advanced its technical capabilities, enhancing the precision, reliability, and security of the Marinestar service for marine applications.
The Marinestar Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Precise Point Positioning (PPP) service, following its 2024 enhancements, now benefits from technology advancements in data-and-cloud-computing, enabling faster convergence and more efficient service for time-sensitive applications. This improvement in data processing algorithms also provides enhanced positioning accuracy, catering to high precision demands of applications within maritime and other critical navigation-dependent operations.
