GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) plays nowadays a major role in different civilian activities and is a key technology enabling innovation in different market sectors. For instance, GNSS-enabled solutions are widespread within the Precision Agriculture and, among them, applications in the field of machinery guidance are commonly employed to optimize typical agriculture practices.

The scope of this paper is to present the outcomes of the agriculture testing campaign performed, employing a real tractor under different scenarios, by Thales Alenia Space Italia in the implementation of a contract signed with the European Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA) and financed by the European Union under the Galileo Programme budget.

The main objective of the test campaign is to evaluate the performance of a set of professional GNSS receivers from a user point of view, employing different combinations of GNSS constellations, signals, and positioning techniques. In particular, the added value introduced by Galileo in combination with other GNSS constellations is analysed in this paper.

The paper presents anonymised performance of six professional GNSS receivers, tested in parallel under the same live conditions. The receivers have been tested on real fields in both open sky and close to forest scenario, with the latter representing a more challenging environment. In particular, GNSS Single Point Positioning (with both Single Frequency and Multi-Frequency approach), Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS), Precise Point Positioning (PPP), Real Time Kinematic (RTK) and PPP-RTK modes have been tested for single and multi-GNSS processing (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou).

The paper summarizes the results obtained comparing the results from 6 different GNSS receivers fixed on the rooftop of a tractor moving at around 6 km/h. The comparison between the different receivers has been based on typical Key Performance Indicators for agriculture-based applications as cross-track and pass-to-pass accuracy, solution availability, continuity, convergence time and number of losses of lock. The preliminary results highlight, on average, comparable performances between the different receivers when analogous positioning strategies are employed. Furthermore, Galileo signals, used in combination with the other GNSS systems, is proven to enhance the performance of the different GNSS receivers evaluated in most of the test cases.