Within the framework of the European GOCE mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2007 by the European Space Agency (ESA), a high accuracy Satellite-to-Satellite Tracking Instrument (SSTI) with two hemispherical-coverage receiving antennas will be used for real time navigation and precise orbit determination. The two GPS antennas are directly mounted on the edge of one of the metallic solar array wings of the spacecraft. Besides of antenna phase center variations (PCV), near field effects like multipath, diffraction and imaging induced by the close vicinity of the antenna can seriously affect the measurement performance of the SSTI. Therefore, several experiments with engineering models of the GPS antennas were performed using the Automated Absolute Field Calibration Technique developed by the Institut für Erdmessung (IfE) of the University of Hannover and Geo++ at Garbsen (Germany). In order to characterize the interactions with the spacecraft, the GPS antennas were first calibrated in stand-alone mode and finally also together with a representative cut-out of GOCE’s solar wing which was mounted beneath the antennas. The differences of both set-ups in terms of PCV as well as carrier to noise ratio (C/No) reveal the influence of the near field effects caused by the wing. Extensive electromagnetic simulations done at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) have confirmed the results. First tests on the final antenna flight-models show performance improvement.