[IGSMAIL-6349] IGS Station Streaming Galileo

[georg.weber at bkg.bund.de]

Author: Georg Weber

Dear Colleagues,

In view of the announced Galileo IOV start end of August and encouraged
by the chair of the Infrastructure Committee, we would like to inform
you about latest developments in upgrading the real-time production
chain to cope with the upcoming European system. Because RINEX v3 is
involved, this may also concern the post processing community. We have
done the following:

(1) The IGS reference station WTZZ (Wettzell) got a LEIAR25 antenna to
also receive Galileo signals. The TPS E_GGD receiver was replaced by a
JAVAD TRE-G3TH.

(2) We encode and stream so-call High Precision (HP) RTCM v3
Multiple-Signal-Messages (MSM) from WTZZ following the latest draft
presented to RTCM by Ashtech. The new RTCM messages under discussion are
intended to be fully compatible to RINEX v3. 

(3) The new stream carrying GPS + GLONASS + GIOVE observations is
available via mountpoint WTZZ0 from Ntrip broadcaster
www.igs-ip.net/home.

(4) An Open Source decoder and RINEX translator for the MSM's developed
under GNU GPL is part of the BKG Ntrip Client (BNC) version 2.5. You may
like to download BNC binaries from
http://igs.bkg.bund.de/ntrip/download. Source code is available from the
SVN software archive maintained at http://software.rtcm-ntrip.org/. With
BNC you could i.e. convert a stream to RINEX v3 or carry out a Single
Point Positioning (SPP) solution using GPS + GLONASS + Galileo
observations.

(5) Broadcast ephemeris for GPS, GLONASS and GIOVE are converted from
RTCM v3 streams to mixed RINEX v3 navigation files and made available
via ftp://igs.bkg.bund.de/NTRIP/brdc. The daily files are updated every
15 minutes.

Please keep in mind that the stream format mentioned above is so far not
an RTCM Recommended Standard. As of today it can't therefore be part of
commercial receiver firmware. Although current GIOVE A/B satellites are
not continuously visible in Wettzell, the stream is disseminated in the
hope that it helps in testing and evaluating the upcoming new signals.
We will follow the further development of the MSM's in RTCM and update
the BNC accordingly.

We thank Dirk Stoecker for writing the MSM encoder and decoder, Leos
Mervart for integrating the decoder in BNC and implementing the combined
SPP solution, and Uwe Hessels for upgrading WTZZ.

Sincerely,

Georg Weber
Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG), Frankfurt, Germany