Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-based technologies have become an indispensable part of current structural health monitoring (SHM) systems because of the unique capability of the GNSS technologies to provide accurate real-time displacement information. GNSS equipment with a data sampling rate of up to about 20 Hz has been widely used for this purpose. High-rate GNSS systems (typically up to about 100 Hz) offer additional advantages in structural health monitoring as some highly dynamic civil structures, such as some bridges, require high-rate monitoring data to capture the dynamic behaviors. However, the performance of high-rate GNSS positioning in the context of structural health monitoring is not entirely known, as studies on structural monitoring with high-rate GNSS positioning are very limited, especially considering that some of the satellite systems just reached their full constellations very recently. We carried out a series of experiments with the help of a shaking table to assess the SHM performance of a set of 100 Hz GNSS equipment and three commonly used GNSS positioning techniques, PPP (precise point positioning), PPP-AR (precise point positioning with ambiguity resolution), and RTK (real-time kinematic). We found that the standard deviations of the 100 Hz GNSS displacement solutions derived from PPP, PPP-AR, and RTK techniques were 5.5 mm, 3.6 mm, and 0.8 mm, respectively, when the antenna was in quasi-static motion, and about 9.2 mm, 6.2 mm, and 3.5 mm, respectively, when the antenna was in vibration (up to about 0.7 Hz), under typical urban observational conditions in Hong Kong. We also found that the higher a sampling rate is, the lower the accuracy of a measured displacement series is. On average, the 10 Hz and 100 Hz results are 5.5% and 10.3%, respectively, noisier than the 1 Hz results.

The differential global navigation satellite system (DGNSS) is an enhancement system that is widely used to improve the accuracy of single-frequency receivers. However, distance-dependent errors are not considered in conventional DGNSS, and DGNSS accuracy decreases when baseline length increases. In network real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning, distance-dependent errors are accurately modelled to enable ambiguity resolution on the user side, and standard Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services (RTCM) formats have also been developed to describe the spatial characteristics of distance-dependent errors. However, the network RTK service was mainly developed for carrier-phase measurements on professional user receivers. The purpose of this study was to modify the local-area DGNSS through the use of network RTK corrections. Distance-dependent errors can be reduced, and accuracy for a longer baseline length can be improved. The results in the low-latitude areas showed that the accuracy of the modified DGNSS could be improved by more than 50% for a 17.9 km baseline during solar active years. The method in this paper extends the use of available network RTK corrections with high accuracy to normal local-area DGNSS applications.