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tonyarklesyesterday at 11:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

To give you a bit of insight, around the same timeframe (late October/early November) I directly observed two high-accuracy RTK GPS receivers reporting high accuracy (2cm), full 3D DGPS lock with carrier phase, and positions wandering within about a 5m circle horizontally. The altitude was staying pretty consistent (within about 1m, which was outside of the reported accuracy but not bad) until there was a sudden 60m altitude shift. This was all while they were sitting static on the ground, verified both by the crew and the accelerometer, gyro, and RADAR data.

There wasn’t a software fix per se, but we were able to quickly add a check to verify that the Kalman Filter’s position variance estimate was on the same order of magnitude as the accuracy level that the receivers were reporting and put a big red warning up. This wasn’t a flight-critical system, but it is the first time we’d ever seen that behaviour from those receivers and we’ve used them for 5 years.


Replies

RossBencinatoday at 12:00 AM

Not my area at all, but I'm extremely surprised that a fly-by-wire system would use GPS as an altitude reference. Is that really the case?

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londons_exploretoday at 6:55 AM

I think it more likely these receivers fell for a spoof GPS signal or some software bug internal to the receiver than a solar bitflip.

a-dubtoday at 12:12 AM

i would expect a huge shift like that to violate the gaussian assumption of the kalman filter? (which i guess is what you're checking, sort of?). regardless i would expect the kalman filter to smooth the shift over some substantial time at least?