The importance of GNSS satellite distribution in static GNSS measurements and real time kinematic positioning

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) has reached their today's level via many countries with the development of their own satellite systems, including U.S.A. and Russia. As a result, GNSS measurement and navigation applications have become the most practical and economical way of today. Providing users with fast, cost-effective and reliable positioning, GNSS is the most preferred and used positioning method, especially with the Network-RTK (CORS) method. GNSS has wide range of uses such as engineering services, scientific studies, aviation industry, navigation, vehicle tracking systems, military areas and therefore has a lot of users. Nevertheless, there are sources of error that negatively affect the position, velocity and time obtained by GNSS. If these error sources are not corrected by appropriate measurement and / or calculation methods, the results will be inaccurate. One of the sources of this error is the satellite geometry effect and this is the main subject of this thesis. According to the results obtained from the numerical application made within the scope of this thesis study; It was determined that the effect of satellite geometry in long-term static GNSS measurements did not exceed a few cm in the result coordinates (assuming other errors were completely eliminated) and thus did not cause important errors in the coordinate computations, but this effect caused significant errors in the Network-RTK measurements.