Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I have an InCommand 1200 with an Ag Leader 6500 and SteerCommand. I am using TerraStar for correction. It is pulling a Deere planter with an array of modules for seed, spray and starter.
Yesterday and once in the yard I have noticed that the GPS icon in the upper right was not green or even yellow when I expected it to be green. Both times when I checked the GPS screens, all my GPS indications were good such as Lat, Lon etc. Checking the corrections screen it indicated that TerraStar was converged nicely. The convergence threshold is set at 30 but it was far better than that.
Yesterday, when I went out for my first field of corn to plant I was driving on some land that will be soybeans later on. I was checking out my AB line for the corn by driving on the next field to confirm that I would be in the correct spot when I pulled into the field to plant corn. This worked as expected.
I then tried to actually plant a bit in a field that will be corn to make sure everything was working before I pulled into the actual field for yesterday. When I turned on the Master switch while stopped, I didn't get the pesky "No speed shut off Master switch" warning as I was expecting. I then drove forward and didn't get any rates for my seed or starter. It was then that I noticed that I didn't have any ground speed. I thought that maybe I had somehow set the speed to manual with a speed of 0.0. No it was set to Display GPS. It was then that I looked at the GPS indicator on the upper right of the screen. It was dull indicating no GPS therefore no speed. I then checked the GPS screens and again I found that all indications were good and TerraStar had converged to 1.3 inches.
My solution was to power the InCommand down, wait a bit and then power it back up. This time the icon went from dull to yellow. I then checked the GPS screens and they looked normal for the situation. On the corrections screen TerraStar started converging at 120 inches as usual and then gradually worked it way down to 30 where the icon went from yellow to green. I then had speed and proceeded to plant.
I had several other first day issues. One was that row 14 was showing good population but poor Spacing Quality. It had more skips and doubles than the other rows. This is on a CCS planter with standard 1.6 bushel boxes. I shortened the delivery hoses inside the boxes so that they are now about 3/4 full at all times until the CCS hoppers run low. I had my great nephew lift the box up and set it on a tire so we could inspect the eSet components. They appeared to be fine. Unfortunately when he did this we caused some other problems. One was that he slipped and fell backwards toward the Ag Leader modules on the planter upper step. This caused the implement switch stub cable to get dislodged. When I tried to plant again, the clutches would not disengage to allow planting. I was able to troubleshoot this quite quickly since I have a manual implement switch in the cab so I can override the real implement switches for testing or unusual circumstances. This is a lighted switch and should be lit when any of the real implements switches or that switch is ON.
Even though the planter was lowered the implement switch indicator was not lit. This caused be to investigate and find the dislodged connector. It was partially broken but we tie banded it to another cable for strain relief. It was actually probably lucky that this happened as we forgot to hook up the seed tubing to the front of the box that we had removed. The CCS blower fan was shooting seed out of that tube on the ground. I would have wasted a fair amount of seed if the implement switch had not been dislodged. I would have continued to plant until that individual box went empty which would be several acres until that happened. A fair amount of seed would have been blown on top of the ground.
Later, row #4 showed no planting. I crawled out to investigate and found that the box was empty. The neighboring boxes were low also. First thought was that the left CCS hopper might be low but the light on the fold box had not indicated that. Turns out that the tie band holding the CCS tubing from the blower Tee to the left side had gotten brittle and broken. This allowed extra stress on the hose and it had pulled off of the seed manifold. In the process, the tube fell into the drive transmission and cut a hole in the tubing. We got the tubing back on and wrapped some duct tape around the hose.
Since its going to rain today, I'm off to my Precision dealer to test row unit 14 on their test stand. When I put this back together I plan on putting unit 14 on row 15. I also plan on swapping the seed tube on 14 with another row. That way if the problem shows again, I can decided if it is the unit or the seed tube. I purposely don't want to have to mess with row 14 again which is in a difficult location to work. I also need to swing by my Deere dealer and get some new tubing for the blower.
Due to weather concerns we only planned on planting 80 acres yesterday. That was a good thing because of the problems we had we wouldn't have gotten much more done anyway. |
InCommand 1200 Conflicting GPS indicators
