Low-cost miniaturized GNSS antenna for landslide monitoring and application in Baige landslide (western China)

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology has been widely used in landslide monitoring. However, under the influence of restrictions such as price, weight and volume, geodetic GNSS receivers and antennas are difficult to be widely used. As an alternative, the low-cost miniaturized GNSS antennas and low-cost GNSS receivers have the advantages of low cost, light weight and small size. Low-cost GNSS receivers have been proved to achieve millimeter-level accuracy in short baselines, but there is a lack of systematic discussion on the ability of miniaturized antennas for landslide monitoring. Therefore, the aim of this research is to test the actual performance of low-cost miniaturized GNSS antennas and select a miniaturized antenna with the best performance. By comparing their differences in three aspects: data quality, positioning accuracy and deformation monitoring capability, the ability of miniaturized antennas for landslide monitoring is analyzed. The results show that miniaturized GNSS antennas have lower C/N0 and higher multipath compared to survey antennas. This also leads to the miniaturized antenna having lower monitoring accuracy. However, based on the displacement monitoring results, the current monitoring accuracy of miniaturized antennas is deemed sufficient for landslide monitoring. After that, the optimal miniaturized antenna selected by the research was applied to the Baige landslide in Tibet (western China). After half a year of field monitoring, the miniaturized antenna has been verified to have a good monitoring effect in landslide monitoring. At one of the monitoring sites of the Baige landslide, a displacement of about 3 cm in the horizontal direction and 6 cm in the vertical direction was detected. In summary, miniaturized GNSS antennas have great potential in landslide monitoring.