Centimeter-level relative positioning with GPS

Although the Global Positioning System (GPS) was designed primarily for real-time navigation and positioning applications at the decameter level of accuracy, the GPS has been used to determine all three relative position coordinates of fixed points with centimeter-level accuracy, when the distance between the points has been of the order of 10 km. For intersite distances less than 1 km the uncertainty is about 3 mm, and for distances greater than 10 km the uncertainty in each coordinate is about 1-2 ppm of the distance. These results have been obtained with commercially available production equipment (Macrometer model V-1000 interferometric surveyors) operated by regular surveying personnel under real field conditions, not just by university scientists under ideal laboratory conditions. Techniques that promise to reduce the uncertainty to 0.1 ppm for distances greater than 10 km are being developed.