Does using a repeater to extend your radio coverage degrade the accuracy of RTK positions?
I was told once and have held to the notion that your vertical accuracy begins to fall off the further away from the base you get, especially beyond a few miles away. Is that true?
Thanks,
Jason
The act of using a repeater in and of itself will not degrade your accuracy as long as you have enough bandwidth to repeat the entire correction stream without dropping anything.
Single baseline accuracy will degrade as the length of the baseline increases, primarily due to changing atmospheric conditions. If the specification of the system is a 1 ppm error RMS, then under good conditions the atmospheric error is within the noise of the solution 67% of the time out to 10Km (6.2 miles). Of course, under less than good conditions this can increase drastically, especially if the atmospheric conditions at the base are not the same as at the rover.
The horizontal accuracy also degrades, but the vertical degrades more rapidly.
Thank you! That perfectly explains what I was taught--the 6 mile mark is what has stuck in my memory to not venture outside of.
