Set up your own caster without the usage of rtk2go.com

By talking in the telegram group, i spoke about using your own caster instead of transferring your rtcm data to a caster like rtk2go. It’s very handy with rtk2go because you dont need to open ports and use your public (mostly changing) ip adress only there’s too much downtime for the service so i’m happy to explain setting up your own caster and make it accesible for the outside world.

What do you need?
An ntrip caster like Snip Caster (windows) or rtklib str2str running on a windows pc or linux based machine.

Next thing we want is a static ip for your broadband connection which we can fill in AOG to connect, the problem is that most ISP’s are having DHCP for the users and that may conflict in your setup because your public ip can be changed randomly. That’s why i use a Dynamic DNS for that part to get rid of the changing ip. First of all you need to check if your broadband modem is capable of having a Dynamic DNS Setup. With this setting, your public ip will be transmitted to the Dynamic DNS service and every time your ip is changing, it will resend an new ip adress to that DDNS resolver. With that service it will translate your ip-adress to a hostname and is accesible thru that. Besides it’s much more handy to remember your Hostname instead of an “188.40.12.202” number.

First, check in your modem if you can find something called DDNS.
If it’s there, go to https://no-ip.com and register a free hostname (free hostnames need to be renewed every 30 days, they send you an email when you need to that, im using mine now for a year, and it takes about 1 minute to renew your hostname).
Fill in the hostname login credentials in your broadband modem and you’re good to go!.

Once done, you have to open a port in your broadband router to get your ntrip caster accesible from outside your home network.

  • Find the device in your modem
  • open tcp port 2101 for that device (can be any port but 2101 is standard for rtk corrections data)

I will update this post later with a few pictures…

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Thanks @Richardklasens_admin for this little tutorial.

I recently began to use rtk2go myself, like a lor of other people I think. However, you talked about downtime on this platform. I didn’t experience any yet. To what extent do you think it is an issue ? Does it occur often and/or for a long time ?

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Ive had several times where it has dropped now mid job…Enough that need to do something else really …

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I have only shortly tested rtk2go out of interest but their up-time figures look poor. Not sure though if there is a dropout when the timer restarts, very likely. And there could be more dropouts that the up-time timer does not show?

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Is there a good SNIP configuration guide online? Mine’s working but I always wonder what awesome feature/setting I’m missing.

I have my RTK Base running via TCP, open my port and configure AOG putting my IP, Port and activating TCP only, my question is where it shows on the screen that I have RTK solution, how do I know if I am getting RTK correction data in AOG?

I have used rtk2go for 2 seasons already and have never had an issue. Have 5 different tractors, sprayer using corrections off of it. I wonder if it makes a difference where in the world it is being used? I’m from Saskatchewan , Canada

Their website says that they have only one machine to run RTK2GO for everyone :
It is running on a common Windows 7 OS on an i5 machine with a reliable internet connection.
So I guess it should run the same for everyone, maybe with a little more ping for people on the other side of the world.

Anyway, if you never had issues with RTK2GO good for you, it suggests that this solution is reliable enough to use in the fields.

I chose to use the caster Centipede in the end, because it is dedicated to build an open NTRIP network (first in France, then worldwide). Also, their team also worked on the server side (the one you have at home) and built a flashable image for Raspberry Pi of their program called RTBKase. It made the installation even easier. Both server and caster are completely independent from each other. You can choose for example to use RTKBase for the convenience of the GUI, and RTK2GO at the same time.

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This thread was brought to my attention by one of our users. A couple of thoughts to interject in the hopes it is helpful.

RTK2go.com is just a copy of the SNIP NTRIP Caster setup for other people (often without a static IP or DDNS solution) to use. We generally prefer you obtain and operate your own copy of SNIP (our Lite (free) model has everything most folks need, our paid models cater to larger networks typically operated by commercial concerns). Our business model is selling Casters, not operating them in competition with our clients, please see our web site if you need more ‘sales’ text or you need a download.

…It is running on a common Windows 7 OS on an i5 machine

The RTK2go node is now hosted out of Ohio in on an Amazon Web Services VM machine. With 1,500,000+ connections every week the bandwidth was slowing our own Los Angles offices down. Often RTK2go is running our most current software, this changes about every 2 weeks and causes an interruption of <60 seconds, normally scheduled around UTC midnight. The uptime of RTK2go itself is well over 99.9% but individual Base Stations can be quite poor due to their own issues.

Is there a good SNIP configuration guide online? Mine’s working but I always wonder what awesome feature/setting I’m missing.

Try Release 3_06_00 Changes - SNIP Support - with 350+ articles on SNIP setup as well as NTRIP and RTCM in general it likely has your answer. Or, press press that small green “i” information icon on the relevant SNIP dialog window. Or, send an email to support[at]use-snip.com and we will assist. We provide support for Lite model users of SNIP as well as our paying users, no worries there.

Regards, DCKelley, SNIP support team

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Hi
I am looking for mounting my NTRIP caster on my dynamic IP address.
My router seam not to be able to support no-ip but I fund this:
https://dyndnss.net

From what I reed, with this I could only open the right port on my router and install a tool on my raspberry pi that would take care of the settings( DynDNS Updater Tool V3.0e).

Does someone heard about or tested this?

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Esprtk is releasing a ntrip caster from their software, can inject 1008 and host without the need for a computer. Supposed to be out in next week or so, will try it once it’s released. Assume will have to use a DDNs unless have static ip and also open some ports

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Once this is done do I just type my no-ip hostname into AOG NTRIP client where it says Broadcaster URL ? Also the mount point name is setup in SNIP correct ?

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Hi everyone.
We are ESPrtk team.
Right now you can create yourself an NTRIP CASTER server with only ESP32 here.
Hope it will help your work.

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Just found this post as I’ve been trying to spread fertilizer this week and ive only had rtk correction 20% of the time. Quite frustrating.

You can start using more stable NTRIP caster.
I use rtkdata.online

Interesting. Besides hosting their own caster, looks like they also connect to other casters including rtk2go and offer those mount points in addition to ones directly hosted with rtkdata.online. So if you’re already using rtk2go you chould be able to sign up with rtkdata and connect your rovers through their ntrip service, and they will proxy the data from rtk2go. Should help eliminate temporary IP bans since you’re connecting to rtkdata and they are the ones connecting (just once) to each rtk2go mount point. That explains why my rtk2go mount point has shown a single client continuously for months, even though I am not using any ntrip clients currently.