A new generation of multi-antenna GPS system for landslide and structural deformation monitoring

As an advanced navigation and measurement technology, GPS has been in the past two decades extensively applied to many fields and disciplines. One of the prominent applications of GPS is the precise monitoring of deformations of, e.g., engineering structures and the crust of the Earth. A limiting factor for large-scale use of GPS in such applications is however its high hardware cost. For continuous monitoring of deformations, each point to be monitored needs equipped with a set of geodetic quality GPS instruments. This makes many applications such as routine monitoring of landslides too expensive in most cases. A multi-antenna GPS system has been developed and tested by the research team aiming at significantly reducing the cost of GPS when used for monitoring deformations of objects such as slopes. The system uses special hardware and software components to allow one GPS receiver to be connected to a number of GPS antennas. One set of such equipment can therefore be used to monitor a number of points. The system reduces the cost of GPS hardware by many folds. This paper describes a new generation of the multi-antenna GPS system that has been developed by the research team. The system consists of integrated hardware and software components for data acquisition, transmission, processing, analysis and visualization. Integration of the GPS system with conventional slope monitoring systems will also be discussed in brief.