Determination of appropriate location for VLBI station establishing in the Middle East to reduce error of EOPs in CONT17 campaign

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is one of the essential approaches in geodesy. Significant capabilities of this technique are creation of International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), determination of Earth orientation parameters (EOPs), coordinates of station with high accuracy and light deflection. Many attempts could be done to increase accuracy of VLBI data, including technical improvement of equipment, physical models improvement, using optimal data processing methods and increasing number of stations. In this study, in order to reduce the error of EOPs in CONT17 campaign, the appropriate position for a VLBI station in the Middle East is investigated. The results showed that mean error of EOPs in the Legacy-1and Legacy-2 reduced approximately 6.64% and 13.86% by adding two stations in Oman and Egypt countries, respectively.