A New GPS System for Continuous Deformation Monitoring

This paper presents a multi-antenna GPS based system developed for local continuous deformation monitoring. Due to a large number of points that needs to be monitored, the standard approaches of using permanent GPS receiver arrays will cause high cost. It eventually becomes the limiting factor for large-scale use of GPS in these application areas. Multi-antenna GPS system allows a number of GPS antennas to be linked to one GPS receiver by a specially designed electronic component, i. e. the so-called GPS multi-antenna switch (GMS), The receiver takes data sequentially from each of the antennas attached to the receiver. A distinctive advantage of the approach is that one GPS receiver can be used to monitor more than one point. The cost per monitored point (i. e. the expenses of hardware) is therefore significantly reduced.