A Simplified Minque Procedure for the Estimation of Variance-covariance Components of Gps Observables

Minimum Norm Quadratic Unbiased Estimation (MINQUE) is one of the commonly used methods for the estimation of variance-covariance components. The MINQUE procedure has been successfully used to estimate the variance-covariance components of GPS observations. However, the MINQUE procedure is a big computational burden, and the requirement of having an equal number of variancecovariance components in the estimation step is a major limitation. It is therefore difficult to implement this procedure when the number of observed satellites has changed during an observation period. In this paper, a simplified MINQUE procedure is proposed in which the computational load and time are significantly reduced. The quality of the results obtained is similar to those from the rigorous procedure. Furthermore, the effect of changing the number of satellites on the computations is effectively dealt with.