I am a student at a university working on my senior project. Our project specification is to have 2 robots that have GPS connection find the bearing of a third robot that does not have GPS. My team found the DWM1001-dev boards and we decided that they would be a good fit into our system. However, I have just recently found some research that claims that UWB might have an effect on GPS. I am wondering if the Decawave module will have a significant effect on the GPS? I have tried to find a concrete answer to my question, but I am not having any luck with that.
The Decawave module transmits from around 3.5GHz upwards.
GPS L1 operates at 1.575 GHz, L2 and L5 are below that. Glonass G1 is the highest frequency GNSS signal and that maxes out at around 1.62 GHz.
In terms of direct interference from the transmitted signals there shouldn’t be any issues.
I’ve run a fairly active decawave system transmitting at full power around 30cm from an RTK GPS antenna without any issues.
However even under ideal conditions GPS signals are only just over the noise floor which means it can be very sensitive to any source of electronic noise. If you stick your GPS antenna right next to the Decawave chip, or any high speed digital chip for that matter, then I’d expect to see a significant degradation in GPS quality.
If you want good GPS data antenna placement and environment is critical, that is true with or without a decawave system in the mix.
I do need to place the GPS RTK antenna right next to the DecaWave Board. One of the constraints of the project is that the Unit must be no larger than a softball. Any Ideas on how to mitigate interference and ensure the GPS-RTK is still as accurate as possible?
What GPS antenna / receiver are you planning on using? and what is your acceptable level of accuracy?
Does everything have to be in a single package or can the GPS antenna be on a short cable?
When I talk about accurate GPS I’m thinking a couple of cm error, for that you are generally looking at an antenna and ground plane with a minimum diameter of 4 inches, ideally more. And the antenna needs to have a nice clear view of the sky which generally means on the top of the thing being tracked.
Generally getting an RTK fixed solution is tricky without a good antenna and antenna placement.
If your idea of accurate GPS is 50 cm or more error and an RTK float solution or worse then that’s fairly easy and you can compromise the antenna a little bit.
Generally keep all of the electronics shielded and below the GPS antenna ground plane. But that could then compromise your UWB range and accuracy so it’ll be a trade off.