Duane, do you use an EZ500 or like for your GPS? Without knowing or realizing it, Trimble is oh so close to effortlessly solving our dilemma of shifting boundaries and operations that span several days with other operations on other fields that come in between actually completing a field. But alas, everyone is hung up on the paradigm of farm, field, tract, etc. When you use the 500 in advanced mode, you have an option to select farm, owner, field, machine, attachment, operator, operation, weather conditions, and a bunch of other stuff before you start a field. When you feel the urge to get these coverage logs onto your PC, you insert a USB stick in the EZ and offload the data , take the stick to the PC and download it, and you can then look at maps of the individual fields to see when and where, and all the tracks of passes you completed when working the field. Getting data from the lightbar to PC isn't exactly seamless though and sure doesn't get done here on a daily basis. Once in the PC, they're not really collated in a coordinated form either. You can pick and choose by fields and kinda see what and when has been done but there's no real overview.

So if I step back and ask how I'd do it better, here's what would solve our problem of shifting borders, interrupted operations, and how much of a big field was seeded or worked on any particular time period. First off, we need to precisely define the legal borders of everything we're farming. A precise duplication of the ASCS maps, complete with edges, farm #s, & tracts needs to be on our computer. When we go out to the field, we need to tell our tractor GPS; Machine, Operator, Implement, and Operation. The GPS knows where it is at, so there should be no need to enter field, tract, farm, owner, etc. When we come back to our PC, the coverage logging gets overlaid on the map outlines and the software figures out which field, tract, etc the operation was applied to. After a few years of data collection, we can go to the map and select an area (whether it's half of a forty or six that are farmed together), select a time period, and have the computer spit out a report that includes total acres, crop use, and everything else that the lightbar kept track of. Notice we didn't need to adjust borders or guess at how many acres were worked per day. The GPS knows that. It is redundant to have to enter it again or guess at it.

Now as far as getting coverage data from the lightbar to our PC: The USB works (kinda) but it's a hassle and at minimum will require at least one power-down of the lightbar. A better way likely exists in your shirt-pocket all ready. Wouldn't it be nice if all that data was fed into your Blue-tooth cell phone as you were riding the tractor, and then when you came back to the office, the PC there would pair with the cell and download the logging data? The amount of data is moderate and doesn't take much more memory than a couple pictures from the cell camera. My $200 Nuvi with Blue-tooth capability needs to be paired with my cell once. After that, any time I get within range, it downloads any changes made in my phone book from the cell to the GPS. I don't need to do anything. Can't be that expensive either if they can get into a $200 device as kind of an afterthought.