One Year's Experience with a Recreation-Grade GPS Receiver

Between September 2008 and September 2009, data were collected with a Garmin Oregon 300 recreation-grade GPS receiver nearly every day, under a variety of environmental conditions. Horizontal position locations were collected in a young pine stand, an older pine stand, and a hardwood stand, each located within the Whitehall Forest GPS Test Site in Athens, GA. The purpose of this study was to determine whether long-term data collected with a recreation-grade GPS receiver were sensitive to stand type, time of year, and a number of environmental variables. We found no significant relationship between observed horizontal positional accuracy and environmental variables (air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, and solar wind speed). We found significant differences in horizontal position accuracy among the three forest types studied.