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By the beginning of 1996 the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) constellation was completely deployed, although several satellites have already been decommissioned since then. With 17 satellites in operation (status as of 21 December 1997, although two of them are unusable and one is a non-operative spare), GLONASS is now an alternative and a complement to GPS. We present an evaluation of the current status of the GLONASS system, paying particular attention to its possible geodetic applications. Data from several receivers were used for this evaluation, including data from GPS receivers in order to allow for a comparison between GLONASS and GPS. We tested the quality of the geodetic observables, the consistency of the broadcast orbits, the single-point positioning results, and we also looked at multipath errors and cycle slips in our GLONASS data. In general the GLONASS performance has been found to be very satisfactory, even better than GPS in aspects such as single-receiver positioning or in the quality of the second-frequency pseudo-ranges due to the degradation of the GPS measurement quality under selective availability and anti-spoofing.

The ionospheric effect is one of the main sources of error in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and Global Positioning System (GPS) high precision geodesy. Although the use of two frequencies allows the estimation of this effect, in some cases dual observations are not possible due to the available equipment or the type of observation. This paper presents the ionospheric calibration of single frequency VLBI and GPS observations based on the ionospheric electron content estimated from dual frequency GPS data. The ionospheric delays obtained with this procedure and the VLBI baseline length results have been compared with those obtained with dual frequency data. For the European geodetic VLBI baselines, both solutions agree at the 3–5 parts in 10−9 level. The noise introduced by the GPS-based calibration is in the order of 3 cm for the VLBI observables and of 10 cm for the GPS observables.

In the last three years, the European Geodetic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Network has grown to a total of six fixed antennas placed in Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, all equipped with the standard geodetic VLBI instrumentation and data recording systems. During this period of time, several experiments have been carried out using this interferometer providing data of very high quality due to the excellent sensitivity and performance of the European stations. The purpose of this paper is to study the consistency of the VLBI geodetic results on the European baselines with respect to the different degrees of freedom in the analysis procedure. Used to complete this study were both real and simulated data sets, two different software packages (OCCAM 3.0 and CALC 7.4/SOLVE), and a variety of data analysis strategies.