Preliminary Assessment of Positioning Performance of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System at Zhongshan Station, Antarctica

This paper assesses the navigation and positioning performance of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System at Zhongshan station, Antarctic, after it is officially announced in operation. The availability of satellites, position dilution of precision, pseudorange data quality, precision of ionosphere model and positioning accuracy are analyzed by real data. The results show that:1) BeiDou is currently capable of providing basic navigation and positioning services through all day at Zhongshan Antarctic station. The overall availability and quality of pseudorange measurements of BeiDou is as good as that of GPS. However, there are some problems, such as uneven distributed satellites over the sky, low elevation of GEO satellites, and the low accuracy of ionosphere model, which would reduce the positioning performance. 2) The precision of BeiDou-only positioning is much worse than that of GPS-only solutions; for single-frequency point positioning, we can only expect accuracies higher than 22 m, 9 m and 25 m in the north, east and up component, respectively; for single-frequency pseudorange differential positioning, the accuracies are 3.6 m, 2.3 m and 3.3 m in the north, east and up component, respectively. 3) The combined system of GPS and BeiDou provides increased reliability and improves the 3D precision of GPS by approximately 10 percent, 22 percent for single-frequency point positioning and single-frequency pseudorange differential positioning, respectively.