Influence of the Relative Position of Receiving Stations on the Accuracy of Determining the Location of the Object

The necessity of an additional study of the influence of the mutual arrangement of receiving stations on the accuracy of determining the coordinates of the object has been substantiated. An algorithm has been developed for determining the location of an object for an arbitrary number of receiving stations using the difference-ranging method. In contrast to the previously used algorithms, it uses all possible differences in the time of arrival of the signal from the radio emission source to the receiving stations. This makes it possible to exclude a rigid binding to the “reference” receiving station, relative to which the difference in range is estimated in the classical differential-rangefinder method. This made it possible to use the differences in the arrival times of the signal from the source between all possible pairs of receiving stations. A method is proposed for calculating the influence of the mutual arrangement of receiving stations and a source on the accuracy of assessing the location of an object. This allows the location of the receiving stations to be preselected so as to minimize position estimation errors in a system with a large number of receiving stations. The results of the algorithm’s operation showed that for a given number of substations, the transition from the algorithm from one “reference” receiving station to the algorithm developed by us makes it possible to increase the accuracy of determining the location of the object by at least 30%. It was found that with an increase in the number of receiving stations, the position determination error when working with our algorithm decreases much faster than when using classical algorithms.