Tier Seven: Full Month-Long CORS-Grade Commissioning
This is the method most people picture the moment someone says build your own base station, and for good reason. It is the most rigorous, most defensible, and most time-consuming approach this companion covers, built for a coordinate meant to anchor years of future work rather than a single project.
Logging raw observations continuously for roughly a month, then processing each day's log independently against final precise orbit and clock products and combining the resulting daily solutions, produces both precision and accuracy at a level no shorter method in this companion can reach.
Why a Month, Specifically
A month of continuous observation spans a genuinely wide range of satellite geometries and atmospheric conditions, exactly the kind of variety a single day, or even several independent days from an earlier chapter, cannot fully capture. Each day's log gets processed as its own, independent solution, against the most refined final products available, whether through OPUS's double-differenced network adjustment or CSRS-PPP's pure PPP processing, both introduced in the last chapter, and the resulting set of roughly thirty independent daily positions gets combined into one final, published coordinate.
The final coordinate from this method is not one measurement. It is agreement across roughly thirty independent daily solutions, which is a fundamentally stronger kind of evidence than even several well-spaced independent occupations from an earlier chapter can provide.
What This Method Is Actually For
This level of rigor makes sense for a permanent monument meant to serve as a reference for years of future survey work, a point other people and other projects will eventually trust without re-verifying it themselves. It is disproportionate for a project needing a coordinate for its own internal use over days or weeks, the situation every earlier chapter in this companion was actually built to serve.
Full month-long commissioning is not simply the correct way to establish any base station, more thorough than the alternatives by default. It is the correct choice specifically for a coordinate meant to be trusted by people and projects other than the one that established it.
The Ceiling This Whole Ladder Has Been Climbing Toward
Every method in this companion, from a five-minute survey-in to this final one, has been a point on a single continuous range, trading calendar time and infrastructure requirements for accuracy and defensibility. This method sits at the top of that range because nothing else in this companion gathers as much independent evidence, across as much genuine variation in conditions, before committing to a final answer.
A monument is being established to anchor a decade of future survey work for an entire organization. Would any faster method in this companion be a reasonable substitute? Almost certainly not. The stakes here specifically call for the kind of independent, multi-day evidence only full commissioning provides.
Full month-long commissioning processes each day of a month-long observation independently against final precise products, then combines roughly thirty independent daily solutions into one coordinate. It is the most rigorous method this companion covers, appropriate specifically for a monument meant to be trusted well beyond the project that established it.
With the entire range now covered, this companion turns from establishing a coordinate to the practical decisions that come after: what to actually broadcast, how to deliver it, and how to know it keeps working.