I have two Ardusimple RTK3b pros one is a base the other is a rover, I have the LR radio on them too, should go like 10km or something, I only work in plan flat mostly empty fields, but the biggest issue I have is the lack of reliability.
I am writing this because my brother used it today and did not have a good experience and now is pretty mad at it, I personally like it and want to keep using it but I have to admit we can’t afford to have it not work.
Of course for me it works 99% of the time.
It don’t actually know what the issue was for him but it will often have a red light which i’ve found usually means a bad signal. and for our use case it will not work like this. I have it set up to a light bar and it has to be exactly on the line.
When it’s really bad it can be sitting still and it’ll be moving a bit.
How high do you mount the base station off the ground?
Have any of you had similar issues and what do you do to deal with them?
I haven’t looked into other options like Ntrip but are those more reliable? or any that work with the existing radio module?
also what do you do when it comes to inclines? it messes up the position and for what i’m using it for it is also a deal breaker for those parts and have to do it the old fashioned way.
Then you have no RTK.
When constantly moving (not just side to side a few cm) then you just follow the satellites in single mode.
I do not have LR system, but for others to help you should supply setup info.
Type og antennas for GPS and LR, length of cables. which setup files for ardusimple. etc.
When choosing LR you probably live in EU or somewhere the XLR higher output is not allowed.
I also don’t mount the base station very high off the ground, I don’t have a permanent spot for it since it’s always at a different field but usually maybe a few feet off the ground, I know usually RTK is like chest level but does it make that big of a difference?
Always as high as possible. Important is line of sight. Base lr antenna on a longer pole. Tractor lr antenna on top of tractor roof. I hope you have gps antenna there as well.
If you have mobile connection at your fields I think you would be better off by going the ntrip way. The Rover gps receiver has a setting for how long time after loosing messages from base, it will continue on rtk mode, up to 3 or 4 minutes. AOG normally show count up from 20 seconds.
with NTRIP wont positions be delayed by the latency of the mobile network? so if it’s even like 100ms in a bad area the position is 100ms behind. i know for autosteer that probably wouldn’t be an issue but for my use case it would.
I have an autofarm system on the tractor as well and that does auto steer and it works perfectly everytime never any signal issues for the most part but it’s also huge. i have all the antennas on top of the tractor but the radio antennas specifically is currently very close to another antenna so I am wondering if that could also be a problem, I defiantly want to configure the rover to just tell me straight if it’s not working or not instead of giving me garbage data. Later today is when I’ll be able to play with it again so i’m going to be doing that.
The F9P rover can continue on RTK even with rtcm correction data as old as 4+ minutes but usually accuracy starts to drop off once it’s 30+ seconds old. All that to say a few ms latency doesn’t really matter.
I’m just thinking how mobile cell is usually slow especially in rural areas I didn’t realize it would be that fast. still don’t think i could use it though because 90% cell coverage is 10% not working at all
I guess I’m wrong about how it works but i figured the rover would just keep a buffer of positions, then when a new correction comes in it just find one with a timestamp that basically matches and then outputs, so if the corrections come in 1 second delayed then the output would be 1 second delayed but I guess not.
I didn’t do my research when I set up my first system. I had xlr radios and tried to set up a base station. When I was half way through that I realized my state had a CORS network, so I just set up NTRIP from the CORS network.
When I set up my XLR radios they were capable of up to a 1 watt output, but they were factory configured to put out 1/4 watt. I changed them to 1 watt when I configured them. I don’t know if the same thing would be true of the standard LR radios. Maybe you can increase the out put in configurations?
If you want to try a set of XLR radios, I have a pair I listed for sale in the classifieds, but they have not sold yet.
Nope. the rover just output position continuously using the last correction available from base station.
Since uncorrected position drift a few mm each second, older correction gives a few mm error
that’s actually what i was hoping i’d find but on the ardusimple site it says the LR is configured as max power while the XLR isn’t
however i plugged my base station into my computer and found that the main RF antenna power was 3/10, then after touching it a bit the cable broke, so this might be something who knows, I wonder if the new cable will help.
anyone know if all TNC to SMA cables are the same?
SMA to TNC cables are all the same. When I had my first guidance system, an Outback S Lite, I just ordered TNC to SMA cables off Amazon when I needed them. They worked fine.
For radio line of sight means something else then normally thought: Visual vs. RF Line-of-Sight - Wat is het verschil? - ArduSimple
Depending of your required distance compared to achievable distance, you should take more care on height, quality of antenna’s, grounding, metal objects close to the antenna, and also quality of cables. Some is described here:
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