Thought id make a post on my base station project for anyone else looking to do something similer.
Ended up using an ESP32, running ESPRTK, an F9P based ardusimple board, and ethernet for connectivity to the caster (Using RTK2GO for now).
Probably simpler now to just use the ardusimple wifi master board plugged into the F9P, but if you want to save a few quid, and do it yourself, here are some photos / video of my project.
I wanted to use ethernet over wifi as I try to avoid wifi on anything that I can.
Short video (awful quality / rushed but might contain some useful info for someone):
I’m nearly at your stage. I have the antenna up. It is surveying in at the moment. Still not 100% sure whether to go Ntrip master, esprtk, raspberry pi or PC. Got the basic hardware for all of them. I want it to be as universal as possible and the 1008 messages are on my mind. Your system should produce them from what bit I’ve read.
I need to brush up on my coding a bit. It would help a lot!
There should be lightning protection on the antenna carrier, it seems to be the highest point, and it will certainly attract electrical discharges.
The equipment is hard to preserve but there will be no more serious consequences … think about it …
I would use the ntrip master without hesitation if it had ethernet support, but being wifi only I didnt go down that route, that said, being ESP32 based, and open source im sure it would be easy for someone to add support for ethernet very easily… But its a very neat solution, and self contained. I still havent got esprtk fully bug free, but I think it may be my ESP itself is damaged, as keep getting irratic issues, and cant see what else it can be now, but will keep posted.
Interesting point, hadn’t considered. Assume it wants to be connected to earth, any idea on size of cable? Would it be surfice to connect to the shed’s steel work? As that is right behind it…
Do you generally have lightning protection at this facility?
The best thing to do is to connect the antenna mount to your existing protection on the object with a lightning rod galvanized, with screw and nut on both sides. and of course clean the paint first.
But in any case, someone more skilled should look and advise you
These are not things for a forum
it is quite a dangerous topic you can break the protection of the entire object!
edit: I don’t think there is a need for the antenna to be so high you can drop it at roof height
the problem of the antenna on the mast is the movement of the wind and there is also the expansion of the metal of the frame which can distort the position
I installed a base station on top of my house yesterday. I have the adrusimpleRTK2B board hooked to a computer through usb. I ran a survey in mode for 12 hours and it got the location averaged to under 10 cm which I was impressed with. I find many videos online showing how to setup agopengps with rtk2go.com but I don’t see any videos on how to set up the adrusimpleRTK2B and cast the corrections to rtk2go.com. Leaving me a little lost on that part. Can I do that inside of U-center or is another program required? I registered with rtk2go but my base station name doesn’t show up in the casting table list.
Under the topic GPS refresh speed - #8 by MortenP
I’ve described how I use the program snip to cast from your Ardusimple to rtk2go.com. If you’ve got further questions let me know.
Perfect! Thank you for the help. I now have it casting to rtk2go.
The input data seems to climb rather fast in SNIP. Will it be like that on the other end when I am using my cellphone data? I read somewhere it was only 2 MB an hour and that would be great but in SNIP its more like 2 MB a minute.
I don’t know if that’s because you send too much information to rtk2go.com. Mine has been up for nearly 15 days now and has sent 715 mb. Mine sends the following messages: 1005,1074,1084,1094,1124 and 1230
Thanks for sharing this Darren. I have been using wifi ntrip master on an espduino but am having connection stability issues so may move over to a similar system. Hopefully ethernet will be better than wifi.
Just a suggestion but you may want to accurately determine the position of your base station using the free OS satellite data (as I think you are in the UK?) rather than surveying in. Data is provided here:
but only with 1 hour delay so a post processed solution is necessary. Full instruction for that can be found here:
I used Ucenter , but you can do either. But basic settings, will work out the box with ublox “base config” file to be honest…just check your port is correct
Hi @darrenjlobb
Really nice base station you’ve got here. Thanks for sharing. I would like to reproduce it.
I agree with you, going with the WiFi NTRIP Master from Ardusimple doesn’t make much sense to me, an ethernet connexion is definitely more reliable and should be preferred for a setup as static as a base station.
To allow me to reproduce your system, could you plesae share a schematic of the whole thing? Also, do you have the references of the modules you use (in particular the ethernet module) ?
Thanks
Valentin
I recently modified someone elses code for a wifi based NTRIP server on ESP32, so that it instead uses the standard Arduino Ethernet Library (So it works with an Uno and an Ethernet Shield V2). I have got it to connect successfully to RTK2GO, but I havent been able to test the RTCM data stream yet (I have installed my base station in the shed, but not yet layed my ethernet cable!).
If anyone already has the hardware and wants to give it a go my repository is here: NTRIP_LAN_Client_for_Arduino
Again just to emphasise, I havent actually confirmed if this works 100% yet!
