The GPS Toolkit

The GPS Toolkit (GPSTk) is coded entirely in ANSI C++. It is platform-independent and has been built and tested on Linux, Solaris and Microsoft Windows. Everything needed to write standalone, console-based programs is included, along with several complete applications.

The design is highly object-oriented. Everything is contained in the namespace gpstk::. For example, reading and writing a RINEX observation file is as simple as this:

// open, read and re-write a RINEX file
using namespace gpstk;
// input file stream
RinexObsStream rin(inputfile);
// output file stream
RinexObsStream rout(outputfile,
ios::out|ios::trunc);
DayTime nextTime; //Date/time object
RinexObsHeader head; //RINEX header object
RinexObsData data; //RINEX data object

// read the RINEX header
rin >> head;
rout.header = rin.header;
rout << rout.header;

// loop over all data epochs
while (rin >> data) {
nextTime = data.time;
// change obs data&
rout << data;
}

The core capability of the library is built around RINEX file I/O. It also includes a complete date and time class to manipulate time tags in GPS and many other formats.

In addition to the RINEX I/O, GPSTk includes classes for handling geodetic coordinates (latitude and longitude) and GPS ephemeris computations. There also is a complete template-based Matrix and Vector package. And, of course, there are GPS positioning and navigation algorithms, including several tropospheric models.

Finally, several standalone programs are included in the distribution. Included are utilities to validate or modify RINEX files, a summary program, a utility to remove or modify observations, a phase discontinuity corrector and a program to compute standard errors and corrections, such as the total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere along the signal path.

The GPS Toolkit is available for download as a tarball (see the on-line Resources section). To build the toolkit you need to use jam, a replacement for make, and Doxygen, a source code documentation generator. The entire build sequence looks like the following:

tar xvzf gpstk-1.0.tar.gz
cd gpstk
jam
doxygen
su
jam -sPREFIX=/usr install

This sequence builds and installs the GPSTk dynamic and shared libraries, as well as the header files, in the /usr tree. In addition, a doc subdirectory is created, containing HTML-based documentation of the GPSTk library.

Below are three example applications of the GPSTk created at ARL:UT. The second example actually is distributed as an application with the GPSTk.

Position solutions generated by the GPSTk provide improved precision and robustness compared to those generated by a GPS receiver. Figure 2 illustrates the benefits; each axis extends from –10 to 10 meters.

Figure 2. Left: positions from a GPS receiver. Right: positions generated using GPSTk algorithms.

Plot A shows position computations and how they vary along the East and North directions. Such results are representative of solutions created with a consumer-grade GPS receiver. Plot B shows how the position estimate improves when atmospheric delays are accounted for. Direct processing not only improves precision, but it also increases robustness. Plot C shows the effect of a faulty satellite. The faulty satellite is detected and removed using the GPSTk in Plot D.

An important problem in GPS data processing involves discontinuities in the carrier phase. Before phase data can be used, cycle slips must be found and fixed. The GPSTk distribution includes an application called a discontinuity corrector that does just that. This feature is available in the library as well.

The GPSTk discontinuity corrector works by forming two useful linear combinations of the dual-frequency phase data, called the wide-lane phase bias and the geometry-free phase. An example of these for normal data is shown in Figure 3. The wide-lane bias (red) is noisy but has a constant average. The geometry-free phase does not depend on the receiver-satellite geometry, but it depends strongly on the ionospheric delay. In fact, it is proportional to that delay. Normally, the ionosphere is quiet and smooth, but at times it can be active and rough; then this quantity can vary wildly. The geometry-free phase and the wide-lane noise increase at both ends of the dataset, because the satellite is rising or setting there. Consequently, the signal must travel through more atmosphere.

Figure 3. Normal wide-lane (red) and geometry-free (blue) phases for one satellite.

Figure 4. Slip detected (blue circle) in the wide-lane data (green) where test quantity (dark blue) is larger than limit (magenta).

The discontinuity corrector works by first looking for slips in the wide-lane phase bias; Figure 4 illustrates a case in which it found one. When a slip in the wide-lane slip is found, the code turns to the geometry-free phase and looks for the slip there. To estimate the size of the slip, low-order polynomials are fit to the data on each side of the slip, extrapolated to the point where the slip occurred and then differenced.

Figure 5. Estimation of the Cycle Slip Size