We have just released magicGNSS version 1.0 (not a Beta anymore!) You can have a look at the brochure we have prepared for the new product.
One of the things you can do with the new magicGNSS 1.0 is to upload and share your own station data (as a *pro* user only). If you share a station other users will be able to process its data in PPP and ODTS. If you want to share your station data, just click on the Share checkbox in My Stations:
Have you ever noticed that a satellite you configured in magicGNSS Beta is missing in the ODTS outputs and report? If this is the case, the satellite was likely unavailable during the configured dates.
As a GNSS user, you may be familiar with the NANUs. NANUs are messages published by GPS operators to inform about events occurring to the GPS constellation (such as maneuvers, on-board equipment maintenance, decommissioning, etc) affecting satellite availability.
magicGNSS needs to know about satellite availability, in particular those events that would affect ODTS, namely:
In order to achieve this, magicGNSS automatically gets NANUs as they are issued, parses them, extracts the relevant satellite availability information and stores it in its database. This is not a trivial issue, as there are 12 types of NANUs, according to the information they provide: the type of outage, whether it is scheduled or not, or other type of information. All the historic information is kept, so each ODTS execution will only consider satellites available in the scenario defined by the user no matter the dates selected!
One of the available scenario settings is the “Refine Station Coordinates” check box. When this is checked, magicGNSS will estimate the station coordinates, yet keeping a constraint to their initial value, as provided by ITRF (or the IGS). This refinement can compensate for some inaccuracies, such as some mismodelling of the Earth motion, thus helping to achieve better performances.
On the other hand, when the observability is not good enough (e.g. when the number of stations/data is insufficient or their distribution is poor) the estimation of the coordinates may be correlated with other parameters and lead to a degradation of performances! So, should one check the box or not?
As the magicGNSS blog gets more entries it obviously becomes increasingly difficult to find some specific information on it. But do not worry, that is why the Search window is there at the top right. Just type what you are looking for (e.g., “presentation” or “paper”) and click on Search. Enjoy!
What is the most exciting way to use magicGNSS? Actually, the easiest one! Inside your magicGNSS account, just click on New to define a new scenario (scenario Name and Start and End dates are provided by default), then click on Save to create the new scenario, and then click on Run to process the data and generate results.
In fact the application selects by default yesterday as Start Date and today as End Date. In this way you get the most recent ODTS estimations possible, for example to monitor the latest behaviour of all GPS satellite clocks, with a latency of just a couple of hours.
Start and End dates are relative to GPS Time, not to the local time of your town! Currently GPS Time is ahead of UTC by just 14 seconds, therefore UTC (or its equivalent Greenwich Mean Time) is a good approximation to GPS Time.
