Long baseline GPS averaging with a phone

[Gordon]

From what I have read, to get decent results you need a dual band GNSS receiver chip in your phone to get the most accurate results, I’ve seen some claims of ~1m accuracy.

I’ve done some testing with my Samsung S6 Lite tablet, which only has a single band GNSS chip, and a single point’s position varies over about 4 metres in tests done over about a week (even though the claimed “accuracy” was just over 1m in some cases).
Averaging sessions were up to several hours long, and with a number of programs, several of which I deleted soon after installing, as they weren’t very user friendly or initially gave terrible positions.
The two I still have on my tablet are PPP Wizlite and 3PGo.

It seems to me that using positions with the size errors I’m seeing are not likely to improve Geo accuracy, and could actually make things worse than not using GCPs at all in some cases, particularly for small areas.

[daniel.dobosi]

Hey Gordon, been there, done that. I thought myself hey, I’ve got a smartphone, not going to spend thousands of euros on a GPS. After I saw the decrease in absolute accuracy when using my smartphone in combination with GCP’s (https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/202558889-What-is-the-relative-and-absolute-accuracy-of-drone-mapping) I’ve bought a GNSS GPS.
In this topic PPK question - #27 by daniel.dobosi there are some recommendations.

• edit: depends on what you want. if you need this professionally, you need to get a GPS.