The GPS unit on my boat regularly claims an estimated position error of 4 feet after it has acquired its full complement of satellites. This is a fairly new mid-price GPS unit using up to nine satellites and WAAS. So my recreational GPS supposedly obtains fifth-decimal-place accuracy. It was running under an unobstructed sky, which is common when boating. Careful use of a good GPS unit should be able to achieve this level of accuracy on land as well.
From http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/ the raw accuracy
of the positioning information from a satellite is less than 2.4 feet 95% of the time. The accuracy reported by a GPS unit is degraded by atmospheric conditions; false signals, e.g., bounces; and the need to determine position by intersecting the raw data from several satellites. Accuracy can be improved by using more satellites and multiple frequencies and by comparing to a signal from a receiver at a known location.
The web page above claims that accuracy can be improved to a few centimeters in real time and down to the millimeter level if a device is left in the same place for a long period of time. I think that these last two accuracies require a close-by receiver at a known location and correspond to what is said in [4].
peter
On 08/30/2017 06:53 PM, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) wrote:
On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org wrote:
[...] Would four decimals after the dot be enough? According to [4] this is what commercial GPS device can provide. If not, why and which accuracy would be appropriate?
I think that should be 5 decimals for commercial GPS, per that link? It also suggests that "The sixth decimal place is worth up to 0.11 m: you can use this for laying out structures in detail, for designing landscapes, building roads. It should be more than good enough for tracking movements of glaciers and rivers. This can be achieved by taking painstaking measures with GPS, such as differentially corrected GPS."
Do we hope to store datasets around glacier movement? It seems possible. (We don't seem to currently https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q770424 )
I skimmed a few search results, and found 7 (or 15) decimals given in one standard, but the details are beyond my understanding: http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisengine/java/gp_toolref/geoprocessin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1947481/how-many-significant-digits-shou... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7167604/how-accurately-should-i-store-la...
[4] https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/8650/measuring-accuracy-of-latitude-...