Samenvatting

This article discusses the revival of the interferometric positioning experiment with GPS signals that aims at measuring the three-dimensional vector between two stations. Such an experiment was carried out in the late seventies, the early days of the GPS system, almost simultaneously by two competing teams that had means, astronomic telescopes, without any common measure with those at stake in our setup. From a hardware point of view, the innovative aspect of this paper lies in the implementation of the experiment with software receivers. GNSS software receivers are attractive tools given the low price of the corresponding front-ends and the flexibility of receiver processing implementations in software. From a positioning point of view, several reasons account for the rediscovery of this experiment. First, a differential positioning technique between two stations, such as relative positioning with GPS signals, originates from the field of interferometry. Secondly, beyond relative positioning with code measurements only, the use of precise carrier phase measurements for GNSS positioning also originates from the interferometry framework. The low price of the software receivers front-ends and the increased precision of the differential positioning techniques are the attractive features of the experiment.