The Department of Natural Resources Mines & Warter SunPOZ Positioning Service
The paper will report on the Natural Resources Mines & Water (NRM&W) experience in operating a network of Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) and the advantages to users of this approach is greater reliability, improved flexibility and increased productivity.
In South-East Queensland NRM&W has established a network of continuously operating reference stations using the Trimble Virtual Reference technology. Covering from the Caboolture to Cleveland, Robina, Beaudesert the service provides centimetre accuracy in real time for surveying, machine guidance and other high accuracy applications.
The service offers both real-time and post-processed products. The real-time service has seen field productivity increases of between 30% to 50% depending on the particular application.
The core of the service is Trimble VRS technology that combines CORS and mobile phones to deliver real-time centimetre positions. Importantly the accuracy of these positions does not degrade relative to the distance from a reference station. Because the service operates within a network of reference stations an interruption to a reference station does not automatically result in an interruption to the survey.
SunPOZ has been used in applications as diverse as setting out rowing courses, photogrammetry and road construction. A number of case studies will look at the performance of the SunPOZ service as well as productivity. While the current applications for SunPOZ are in the surveying arena there are expanding applications in the areas of machine guidance for mining and construction as will as precision agriculture and asset management.
The robustness of GNSS has been given a boost by the resurgence of GLONASS as a viable satellite positing system. This together with the pending Galileo system will have a significant impact on the usability of GNSS and services such as SunPOZ in difficult sites like open cut mines.