Experimental study on low-cost satellite-based geodetic monitoring over short baselines

The use of geodetic techniques, in particular of the global positioning system (GPS), or other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), for monitoring different kinds of deformations is a common practice. This is typically performed by setting a network of geodetic GPS/GNSS receivers, allowing accuracies in the order of millimeters. The use of lower-cost devices has been recently studied, showing that good results can be achieved. In this paper, the impact of the software used for the data analysis is also investigated to verify whether a fully low-cost monitoring system, i.e., both hardware and software, can be set up. This is done by performing a series of relative positioning experiments in which data are processed by different software packages. The main result is that by using a low-cost u-blox EVK-6T GPS receiver and analyzing its data with free and open-source software, movements of the order of a few millimeters can be detected when a short baseline with daily solutions is used.