Hi,
I’m curious to know if there’s any hidden drawbacks or issues when a receiver is at an angle?
I’ve been experimenting with my RTK facet, it seems to accurately display the height and position of the center of the antenna, no matter the angle. So just putting it out there, is it critical to have the antenna point directly to the sky, or will i still have reliable data, even at an angle?
Keen to hear some thoughts!
Hey JM,
If you have the Facet on a survey pole, and have the offset from the phase center set to the tip of the pole, then leaning it over will net incorrect results (which is why many of those poles have bubble levels in them). I think that, with an offset of 0, tilting the antenna around would still report accurate values for the APC. That might be a good test to try out; make a tilting jig that has the APC located on the rotational axis, then watch positional reporting as you tilt to different values.
Another consideration is that tilting the antenna limits the antenna’s skyview (Earth occludes it).
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In the CONUS the Northern Sky is relatively devoid of satellite tracks (say +/- 15 degrees)
The ground-plane under the antenna should be limiting signals from behind.
So some directions and degree of tilt are going to be more problematic than others.
But the receiver is solving for the notional phase-center of the antenna from a signals incident perspective.
The L-BAND (PointPerfect) satellite is relative low in the sky to the south of me, perhaps 40 degrees above horizon. I do find that significantly impacted by antenna angle, works much better with an antenna aimed directly at it (elevation + azimuth). Got some set up on a cheap motorized camera mount as part of a long-term thought experiment to map signal strength and data integrity.