This article reports the experimental results of a novel visible light positioning system using a calibrated propagation model. The developed positioning system requires only 12 offline measurements to estimate the received signal strength-distance relationship. Two calibration techniques are developed and tested within a real-life implementation employing ceiling mounted commercial off-the-shelf light emitting diode luminaires as transmitters and cheap photodiode-based receiver tags. Mean localization error of 2.8 cm and 90-percentile error of 5.2 cm can be achieved using lateration. The proposed technique is shown to be as accurate as a fingerprint-based method while requiring far less effort for offline calibration.