Professional Land Surveyor News: NOAA Releases Real-Time RTK Guidelines

Professional Land Surveyor News: NOAA Releases Real-Time RTK Guidelines

This is a press release published by NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) with important information for professional land surveyors who are using Real-Time GNSS positioning.

NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) recently announced the approval and release of a document titled “National Geodetic Survey User Guidelines for Single Base Real-Time GNSS Positioning.” The guidelines provide definitive criteria to achieve various specific tiers of precision, with high confidence, using global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Due to the plethora of variables associated with Real-Time GNSS positioning (RT), a consistent documented approach for using this technology to best advantage was lacking. In preparing this publication, thousands of pages were researched to evaluate, refine, and compile comprehensive information into an integrated form, thereby ensuring the most practical and reliable methodologies were developed for high-precision work.

Real-Time GNSS positioning is rapidly becoming the favored method for obtaining centimeter-level coordinates and will continue as a dynamic technology, due to advances in hardware and software, additional GNSS constellations, and new signals available to the user. These guidelines will be updated as these developments affect Real-Time procedures and data.

The new document fills a void that exists for Real-Time GNSS positioning practitioners in two ways:

1. Provides background information necessary for RT users in the field
2. Provides specific procedures and criteria to achieve 95% confidence with RT results

It is anticipated that the background information and best methods promoted in this document will become standard reading to help professionals achieve accurate, consistent, and reliable data for their work.The guidelines may be found here. (This is an 8.9mb PDF file.)

Professional Land Surveyor Source

NOAA-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Geodetic Survey (NGS)