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by dramm 979 days ago
To be clear GPS does provides high-quality Doppler derived velocity. It's a fundamental output of all GNSS systems, separate from the positional data and certainly not provided by differencing positional data.

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I suspect much or all of the data boradcast is GPS derived. Would be nice to have some hard data there.

For almost all general aviation aircraft in the USA the data source for ADS-B Out is GPS. All the GA STCs I've seen are GPS only position sources. Many modern GA aircraft will have AHRS but not a full INS, and so INS is not an option for them. Even on larger business jets that may have INS with GPS integration I am not clear any actually use it to drive ADS-B Out, the few installations I've looked at were all GPS.

Boeing was an early advocate for GNSS alone driving ADS-B Out. I think their argument was simplicity, everybody has the same data, and not dependent on erroneous INS or INS settings. I'm not sure what they ended up doing with all their actual installations. If the intent is to send more exotic data such as roll-angle they'll need some INS or at least AHRS integration, but there is no requirement to broadcast that data. The few early third party STCs I saw for ADS-B Out installations in Boeing aircraft only used GPS data sources.