Precision Geolocation of Propagation Data Using GPS and Data Fusion

Abstract

Geopositioning uncertainty degrades the usefulness of the data collected while conducting propagation measurements in the field. Researchers currently have access to highly detailed terrain, propagation, and locational data sets, but these data are useless if you don’t know where you are in the world; this, in turn, hampers the development of propagation models. This paper describes a commercial off-the-shelf engineering solution being developed by the US Department of Commerce’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences that mitigates the problem of dynamic positioning in urban corridors and reduces our positioning uncertainty by as much as an order of magnitude in the horizontal plane.