News from SKPOS – 2nd half of 2023
New "Nearest reference station" service
From 1st January 2024, we are launching a new "Nearest reference station" service, which will be available via mountpoint SKPOS_CM_NS_34_MSM7. This service does not use a network solution and does not generate a virtual reference station, but corrections are provided directly from the nearest reference station. Based on the approximate location, the control software identifies the nearest reference station and starts sending data directly from that reference station. Due to the different distribution of masses in the atmosphere and different conditions between the location of the reference and the moving receiver, the method is reliable up to 20 km from the reference station. The advantage of the method is that a larger number of satellites are sent than with the VRS (Virtual Reference Station) method. More information about the concept of the nearest reference station can be found in the Tutorials section.
We are in the 25th cycle of solar activity, the peak of which was predicted for 2025. However, as can be seen from the graph, the situation is even worse, because the values of the expected maximum were already higher this year. Increased solar activity can cause you a problem during measurement, especially in the winter months in the lunch hours. During these hours, we therefore recommend monitoring the state of the ionosphere, which is available after logging into the SKPOS Online Shop. You could find there answers to frequently asked questions about that problem, for example, on the solar cycle page.
During the summer, 11 older NetR9 receivers were replaced with the new Alloy. Altogether, 19 out of 36 reference stations can provide data from third generation BeiDou satellites.
In cooperation with the Department of Forest Management and Geodesy, Faculty of Forestry of the Technical University in Zvolen, we included a new physical monitoring station TUZV in the SKPOS monitoring. You could see the results from TUZV on the SKPOS network solution monitoring website by selecting the "Physical stations" option. The number of SKPOS monitoring stations should not end with this step, on the contrary, we plan to add at least one more in the future.
Passive corner reflectors for the InSAR method were added on the other two reference stations (DOPL, LIE1). In total, we have already 14 reference stations equipped with InSAR reflectors in SKPOS.
In October, we crossed the threshold of 3000 registered users. While we waited 10 years for the first thousand, the second we achieved in another 5 years, and the last one in only 3 years.
Since November, O2 has been the new virtual private network provider. Connection speed and availability have increased, delays in the flow of data from reference stations to the national service centre have been reduced.
Maintenance of reference stations
We used the change of virtual private network provider to perform complete maintenance on all reference stations.
Service availability
According to independent monitoring, the availability of the SKPOS service this year was 99.99%.
SKPOS is on Facebook
There are already almost 400 of us on Facebook. If you are not following us yet and are interested in various behind-the-scenes information, do not hesitate to visit us.
