Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I used to use a Trimble 332 with Omni as the GPS source for my planter tractor. Since the GPS and Ag Leader stuff was all added after the fact it was wired hot so shutting off the tractor would not kill the GPS. I would just leave the GPS on during the planting season. This worked fine except that the Trimble was very fussy about voltage and complained about low voltage at times. I simply did not believe the error message as checking the voltage with a meter showed it to be fine even when the message was appearing.
The problem came about when I would restart the tractor in the morning at times. I would enter the tractor with the GPS showing a converged status, only to have the 332 drop convergence when I started the tractor which dropped the voltage slightly. This meant that convergence needed to begin again.
To get around this problem I purchased a garden tractor 12V battery and placed it beside the seat. I wired the GPS to it. This meant that the GPS was running off the 12V battery and not directly off the tractor batteries. The small battery was charged by the tractor but I placed a diode in this path. That meant that the GPS was powered by the garden tractor battery which was charged by the main system battery. When starting the tractor the diode prevented the main system batteries from drawing the small battery below the acceptable voltage value.
I did not seem to get the low voltage warning with this setup although it actually should have been worse, due to the voltage drop across my "charging" diode. This arrangement worked well for several years. I now have a different tractor and planter.
I now have an InCommand 1200, GPS 6500 and SteerCommand in an 8310R. I am using TerraStar for correction. This uses CAN based steering and would be more difficult to wire around the tractor to keep things "hot" during planting season. Like Omni, there is the TerraStar convergence time. For whatever reason, this hasn't seemed to be much of an issue with this rig. I start the tractor and the time I'm ready to leave for the field, TerraStar has converged and things are fine.
Omni-Star really got a bad rap around here a couple of years ago. Some speculated that after Trimble bought it they wanted it to "go away" in favor of their other correction systems. |
Eliminating convergence time on CNH tractors using OmniStar or RTX
