The OMNISTAR virtual base station system

The OMNISTAR Virtual Base Station system was developed in 1990 to provide users reliable differential GPS corrections for high accuracy real time applications. At the present time there are two OMNISTAR systems covering the continental United States and the whole of Australia and New Zealand. The system delivers its corrections via geostationary satellites, thus providing seamless coverage over the entire service areas. The OMNISTAR system is unique in that corrections from the entire network are used in the user system solution in order to generate the RTCM corrections, The OMNISTAR unit provides RTCM corrections to a users GPS engine as if the base station were within a kilometer of the present users position. This paper will describe the OMNISTAR network and the user system. It will show results that have been accumulated over the last four years that demonstrates that the accuracy of the OMNISTAR system is dependent upon the quality of the GPS receiver.