Started in February 2016, the EUROSTARS E!10235 EDWIGE project has been jointly developed by two of the partners of GIMS (GReD and Saphyrion) to demonstrate the feasibility of a very low-cost GNSS receiver enabling a very pervasive densification of GNSS water vapor sounding (WVS) networks, at present equipped with high-cost, professional GNSS stations only.
In the context of the project, a very cheap L1/L2c receiver based only on consumer GNSS chipsets, wisely retrofitted to handle also the L2c band and being fully suitable for the intended task, has been successfully demonstrated.
The receiver, that can be viewed as a simpler and preliminary embodiment of what the more sophisticated GIMS GNSS board will be, has been used to setup a network of eight GNSS water vapor sensing stations currently in operation in a hilly zone surrounding the Italian town of Como.
Beside its interest for the specific application, this pioneering work has allowed to optimize a design that will be exploited, with the necessary modifications/extensions, also in the development of the GIMS receiver.
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