Single-frequency cycle slip detection and repair for a standalone GNSS receiver using a common-antenna-based dual-board design

Low-cost single-frequency receivers are increasingly applied to high-precision positioning in support of high-performance GNSS market applications. However, frequent and multiple small cycle slips (CS) detection and repair is a limiting factor for single-frequency receiver-based high-precision positioning techniques, particularly in challenging environments. In this contribution, a single-frequency CS detection and repair method for a standalone GNSS receiver is proposed by using a common-antenna-based dual-board design. This design can produce two independent phase measurements received from the two boards at the same frequency for each satellite. The proposed method can construct between-board, between-epoch, and between-satellite triple differences by using these measurements to eliminate interference errors as statistics for detecting and repairing CS. If the reference satellite has a CS, the CS is transferred among the statistics caused by the between-satellite difference operation, which inevitably leads to incorrect CS detection. To solve this problem, the proposed method further considers adding a common clock design between the dual boards sharing one antenna. In this way, the between-board difference operation can directly eliminate receiver clock errors without performing the between-satellite difference operation, thereby avoiding the problem of the reference satellite. A real-world static and kinematic experiment was conducted to test the proposed method. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed method can achieve better CS detection and repair performance in terms of different multipath effects, dynamics, and sampling intervals, making it possible to obtain better positioning performance in carrier phased-based positioning techniques.