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| I've stayed out of this discussion because there are lots of people more knowledgeable than me on guidance, but I will say it seems like you've got a chip on your shoulder when it comes to anyone who has something more expensive than your 500.
I don't doubt it works for you planting and will work for a lot of people as a guidance system for planting, but I also doubt it will work for everyone like that. You're sitting in the middle of what a lot of people would call God's country. Flat, black, open, not a lot of hills, trees or anything like that. Not all of us have land like that. We happen to have some of both, flat and open and not flat and open to put it kindly.
I've not used a guidance system much, tried one 3 years ago and was not happy with it. I have however used a yield monitor on my combine and recorded yield results for over 10 years now and I can see the kind of tracks that a WAAS correction puts on the combine maps. It may be perfectlly good for a while and then it's all over the board for no reason at all. Or maybe when we get behind a bluff or a bunch of tree's and it's all over again.
One gentleman in the other discussion made the comment that he watched his 500 vs markers for the "whole afternoon" and it was right on....WOW the whole afternoon. I feel sorry for him if he makes the decision to do away with his markers based on one afternoon's trial.
We've been demo'ing a GS2 and the first afternoon we had it on sf1 it was absolutely right on. I was thrilled. I went home that night thinking that we didn't need any subscription signal and we'd be in great shape. I went out the next morning in a different field and the third pass through it took off so fast and so far that my front tire was over the marker line before I could grab the wheel. Evidently something had cut off our correction. Since then I've tried sf2 and it gives us a reliable signal in more places, but there are still some areas of some fields that I've had to go back to good old fashioned armstrong steering. I seriously doubt your 500 would work any better for us in the same field.
There are a lot of other factors that would go into what type of system you would buy, what you want to use it for, what you want to get out of it etc. Everyone tends to like what they have, me included. What's right for one person may not be for someone else.
It's easy to say there are lots of things on the horizon that will be great improvements over what we have now. That's a given. Our combine is run by a man who spent a lot of years in the military flying fighters and then flew for a commercial airline until as he put it he "got tired of looking in the phone book every morning to see where he was" and took early retirement. So many of the things we use now were available years and years ago and were developed specifically for the military. He's told me many a time about what we think is new technology now really isn't.
One thing I learned on computers is you don't have to be on the very cutting edge of evolution, one step back normally saves you a lot of money, but if you sit around waiting to buy something and don't because something better will come along and yours will be outdated then you will never get into the game. I'm not about to spend any money now that is based on a "rumor" that something else will hapen to make what I'm doing now work better. It would be like you sitting there with your 500 and expecting WAAS to get better and make you system into something as good as RTK.
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WAAS performance upgrade ?
