Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I too am confused about the shifted lines situation. I am currently using 5.1 on the Insight.
When planting corn and soybeans I used the Remark feature with good success even with 5.1. My situation is a bit different as I generally haven't been saving the Remarked or shifted lines. I have several fields where I have saved the property line rather than the actual AB line.
I use this as an absolute reference and then use the Remark feature to move the line for my first pass. I thought this would be less confusing than my "old" way of saving a bunch of AB lines for each field that were created with different implements with different widths. I hope to some day have AB lines for each field based on the absolute outer edge. In some cases this will be quite easy and in others not so easy.
In some cases I have "shared" this line with my neighbor who also has an Insight. If we both have the same absolute property line in our respective Insights and then each base our first pass off of this line we should end up with some nice straight consistent rows where our fields are adjoining.
We really only did this on one field but plan on using this more in the future. With that field, I saw that he was heading out to plant so I drove over and stuck my CF card in his Insight. He imported my (our) property line into his Insight for the field name that he uses for his field.
We then reasoned that he should shift the line 20' since he has a 40' planter. He wanted to shift 20.5' to have a little extra room but the system would not allow 20.5' for the shift so he chose 21'. Now that the crops have emerged the rows are nice and straight but 1' wider than we would really like. In other words he should have chosen 20' and it would have been great. I save these lines with a descriptive name that usually includes both parties so that if we share these lines there might be less confusiog.
Our last crop to plant was Green Freezer Peas. These are planted with the company's tandem drill that we pull with our tractor. Since my 8120 has autopilot and the drills have no markers, this was the tractor of choice. The drill has a hydraulic hitch so that the drills can be pulled down the road. When the hitch is operated in the field position, the drills are staggered front to back with a slight overlap.
In the field positon the drills do not pull straight behind the tractor so I used the OFFSET feature. From a visual perspective it appeared that the centerline of the two drills was about 16 inches to the left of the tractor centerline.
While in the process of fine tuning this offset, I would use the Remark feature to move the AB line which was established when the adjoining soybeans had been planted (not the property line this time). I would pull in and visually line up the drill in the position that I felt was correct. Looking at the screen I could see that I was not on the AB line which was understandable. I then did the Remark process and the AB line moved to my current position as I would expect. When I took off and Engaged the autopilot, the line would shift back on the screen and the autopilot would steer based on that line which seemed to be the old line.
I probably got myself confused with the Offset business as I suppose the Offset is applied "after the fact". With my corn and soybeans I was planting with a planter without an offset. I probably should have tried shifting the line a certain distance rather than eyeballing and using Remark.
I eventually narrowed up the width of the drills slightly and used a 1.2 foot offset. I let the drills overlap considerably on one pass and from then on everything was fine. Trying to mess with the offset by trial and error can get very confusing.
So now that I think through the process I am unsure if the system was confused or just me.
Edited by tedbear 6/29/2008 06:43
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Saving shifted Insight guidance lines
