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Best GPS for SP sprayer
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Ed Boysun
Posted 8/1/2010 11:02 (#1296291 - in reply to #1295872)
Subject: RE: Best GPS for SP sprayer



Agent Orange: Friendly fire that keeps on burning.

My first sprayer was an old pickup with homemade booms with tires at the outer edge of the booms that kept the boom at the proper height and left just a hint of a track. Guidance consisted of stopping when I turned around and backing up to find the boom track and then making a guess as to where I needed to be. When I got to where I thought I should be, I'd pick up the row and follow that to the other end of the field. Look around for just an instant and you'd lose the row, so you had to concentrate. After a day of spraying, I'd lay down for the night's sleep and all I'd see is wheat rows coming at me. Of course, since my drills didn't have markers and were wide enough that parallax really made it hard to judge where you needed to be when seeding, the rows I was using for guidance were pretty crooked by the time you got to the far edge of the field. Crooked wheat rows made for crooked sprayer rows and crooked combine passes -- not the best.

When I upgraded the sprayer to a Coupe with foamer, I could use the foam to pick up the next pass and confirm that I was in the proper row but just a little bit of cross wind would drift the foam and exclusively following the foam would double the error introduced by the drifting foam, so I ended up making judgments about allowance for foam drift and still relying on wheat rows that were usually crooked. It didn't require the concentration of rows only, so at least I didn't see approaching rows in my sleep, after I got a foamer.

When I finally put guidance and auto-steer on the seeding rig, things got a whole lot easier because then I had straight rows that I could have used with the sprayer & combine. It wasn't a big deal to mount the EZ-Guide and EZ-Steer in both the combine and sprayer though, so that's what happened and aside from the sprayer not having to fight it's way out of crooked wheat rows, it wasn't as big a deal as it would have been if neither combine or sprayer had auto-steer.

The EZ-Guide+ didn't really have a large enough screen for the coverage map to be really useful to me, so I upgraded to a 500 and hooked up wires so it painted when the air-seeder clutch was energized or the booms on the sprayer were turned on. When done like that, it makes a really nice map like this on of seeding.

seeding 

When I'm seeding, I always set either a straight A-B or a curved A-B for each edge of the field. When spraying headland passes, I normally don't take time to do an A-B, but rather just free-hand them and use the coverage map to find the right row to get the proper overlap & coverage. I then re-use the A-B on the long edge that I used for seeding and my sprayer doesn't have to fight out of any furrow. If you didn't have auto-steer, it wouldn't be a big deal to just use the coverage map to stay in the right row. It is so much nicer and more accurate than foam will ever be.

As far as using EZ-Steer on your truck sprayer; I wouldn't bet that it won't work. My 218 Coupe has the wide lo-pro tires and no power steering. It works very well with EZ-Steer.

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