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Abstract

The GNSS is largely used for geophysical applications and data from global reference networks are routinely used to monitor ground displacements. The INGV manages a dense GNSS network designed for monitoring the active Neapolitan volcanoes in the Southern Italy. For high-precision geodetic applications, each observation site needs a professional GNSS receiver and antenna that are expensive instruments. On the other way, GNSS receiver are now largely used in any mobile devices (smartphones, any smartwatches, cars) and this has involved the development and diffusion of a series of low-cost GNSS receivers. The objective of this work is twofold, first of all, the results of the analysis of about 14 years (2006-2019) of continuous GNSS data (cGNSS) are presented. Our analyses, which focus on Mt. Somma-Vesuvius area, concern the assessment of the tropospheric delay to be used as a probe tool to quantify precipitable water and tracking its time-space evolution. An increase in precipitable water at an average rate of about 2 mm/decade turns out from our analysis.The second objective is the comparison (on a one-month data sample) of the tropospheric parameters obtained with our prototype instrument, named “V60”, a low-cost receiver supporting L1 and L2 frequency integrated with an environmental sensor in a single CPU with those retrieved from a co-located GNSS geodetic station. The results obtained so far are encouraging, because the two sets of parameters are in good agreement.