Results of Absolute Field Calibration of GPS Antenna PCV

Abstract

The electromagnetic behavior of antennas is not homoge-neous. The so-called phase center variations (PCV) de-scribe the signal reception of GPS antennas and have been an important field of interest for the GPS community during the last years and still are. It remains as a main goal to improve antenna calibration procedures and to evaluate their accuracy. The paper presents some results of an ap-proach, which can determine azimuth- and elevation-dependent PCV of GPS antennas in an absolute sense through a field calibration. The PCV for different antenna types derived from absolute field calibrations are evalu-ated and remaining error sources are discussed. The im-pact of absolute PCV on regional/global networks using mixed or even identical antenna types is characterized.