Glonass at northern latitudes

Recently there was news about Glonass working better at northern latitudes,
because the Glonass satellites are places at higher orbit.

http://gpswire.net/?p=1820

Just wondering if any member of this newsgroup has any view to share on this.

Best wishes
Maneesh

Maneesh Prasad wrote:
because the Glonass satellites are places at higher orbit.

The 55-degree inclination of the GPS sats actually means that we here in
Scandinavia average better coverage (in nr of visible sats) than major
parts of the US, since we can see the northern parts of the orbits of
the sats currently located over the Pacific.

What we don't get is any sats directly above us, so VDOP is slightly
worse, particularly in the northern parts of the country.

(Norway stretches from 50 to 71 degrees north.)

Terje

--
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Terje Mathisen wrote:

Oops, sorry! That should have been "from 58 to 71 degrees"



--
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

The article is misleading. Especially the following statement.

"Sweden has moved to using GLONASS. Why? Because in northern countries
GLONASS has an advantage over GPS. The Americans themselves will be
forced to use it at northern latitudes," he said.

It implies that the network is moving away from GPS and towards
GLONASS. That's not true. Most networks already utilize GLONASS in
addition to GPS. There's a lot of benefit in using GLONASS for high
accuracy receivers because it adds more observables, not necessarily
because it improves at higher latitudes. Even networks at low
latitudes see great benefit of using GLONASS.

I've used GPS alone up to 65 degrees north in the western hemisphere
with no problems.

If you want to view a comparison of GPS alone vs. GPS and GLONASS, use
one of the free mission planning softwares and plug in a high
latitude.


because the Glonass satellites are places at higher orbit.

GPSGUY wrote:

65N? That's in the middle of Norway. :-)

I've been on a 180 km snowmobile trip in Svalbard, parts of it in dense
fog, in order to visit the first three confluence points in the area:

78 N, 16/15/14 East: GPS coverage was perfect, no problem with loss of
sat visibility due to the horizon:

Start from:
http://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=8135

Terje

--
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"