TEQC is unmaintained. What to use instead
TEQC remains useful for compatible legacy workflows, but UNAVCO has ended its development and it does not support RINEX 3. Select a replacement by testing the RINEX versions, signals and quality metrics you need, and retain a representative legacy report for comparison.
What happened to TEQC
TEQC — Translation, Editing and Quality Checking — was UNAVCO's workhorse for two decades and is still the tool most GNSS engineers reach for first. Its last release was in February 2019, and UNAVCO has since confirmed it is no longer developed. It works, and for a great deal of routine work it works well. Its compatibility must be checked against the exact receiver messages and RINEX observables in your archive.
The RINEX 3 problem
TEQC reads RINEX 2. It does not read RINEX 3, a format widely used by modern receivers and GNSS data archives. In practice that means a conversion step before every quality check, and a conversion step is a place for observation types to be dropped silently — RINEX 3 signal identifiers do not all have a RINEX 2 equivalent, so the file TEQC grades is not always the file you recorded.
The constellation problem
TEQC has support for several GNSS systems in parts of its translation and editing workflow. Translation support must not be confused with equivalent quality-check support for every constellation and observable. Consult the TEQC documentation and test the actual file; choose a modern QC workflow when its supported formats and metrics better match the data.
Modern Multi-GNSS Capabilities
- Full-constellation QC analyzers — actively maintained, supporting RINEX 2, 3, and 4 across GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and QZSS with comprehensive cycle slip and multipath evaluation.
- High-throughput format processors — handling clean observation extraction, version translation, and header validation without metadata loss.
- Fast lightweight summary engines — rapid validation pipelines tailored for real-time station monitoring and quick site checks.
- TEQC legacy compatibility — preserved for historical baseline comparisons and backwards compatibility with legacy survey archives.
The practical problem with standalone utilities
Standalone command-line utilities each require separate compilation environments, unique configuration parameters, and disparate output formats. Reconciling differences between disparate reports manually adds friction. PosFlow Crux solves this by integrating high-performance multi-GNSS analysis into one unified, normalized report with standardized 0–100 composite scoring.
What we would actually recommend
If your archive is RINEX 2 and GPS-only, TEQC is fine and will remain fine. If you are recording multi-GNSS RINEX 3 with signals your legacy workflow cannot preserve, run something that reads it natively rather than converting down to a format that predates half your data.
References and methodology
Technical definitions follow the sources below. Worked examples are illustrative; product-specific thresholds are identified as PosFlow settings. For corrections, contact PosFlow with the article URL and the relevant specification.