ABSTRACT This paper presents a methodology to investigate the standalone performance of GNSS receivers in controlled covered agricultural environments (CAEs) and to derive implications for resilient PNT. Two GNSS receivers, a high‐end survey‐grade system and a mass‐market system were evaluated focussing on their positioning precision (i.e., the dispersion/sigma around a mean‐centred reference) within Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) covered polytunnels and Cambridge‐style glass greenhouses relative to an open‐field baseline. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of standalone GNSS performance in CAEs under controlled conditions assessing its feasibility for precise positioning without augmentation or correction services. Static positioning tests over 2‐hour sessions in each environment are complemented by RF propagation measurements to characterise the attenuation properties of ETFE and greenhouse glass. All datasets are made openly available to support reproducibility and future PNT algorithm development. These findings indicate that polytunnels are more suitable for precision agriculture applications relying on standalone GNSS, offering robust and reliable decimetre level positioning. In contrast, glass greenhouses require augmentation or sensor fusion for precision‐critical tasks. The insights and open dataset provide a quantitative basis for agritech system designers and PNT researchers to select appropriate environments and to design resilient PNT architectures for CAEs.
Schofield et al. (Thu,) studied this question.