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Kingston, Iowa | I’ve run a few days planting on the Iowa CORS system. I’m using a 500 with EZ Steer, streaming from free GNSS radio on a “Carputer”. My Internet is coming from a cell phone via blue tooth tethering.
The PC boot’s very fast. It is hooked to keyed power on the tractor so it starts as soon as the tractor is turned on. I have a bare minimum of things running on it so it doesn’t take much time to load. The GNSS Radio program is loaded in the startup folder, it appears on the screen after windows boot. I setup Internet sharing on the phone, allow the connection on the computer, and push the start button on GNSS Radio and data starts streaming to the 500. Probably 2 minutes total before ready for guidance.
On the positives it is much more reliable than the WAAS I was using last year. No more nudging or waiting for reception first thing on startup. Planting around a few pivots, I had to leave the parking lane until the pivots were moved 180 degrees. I came back to them a day later and split the mark just like you would expect RTK to do.
There are a few issues though. I had some of the same issues others have reported with low sats around 5 – 6 PM. That has lasted for at most for 20 minutes. I had high HDOP at one point that wouldn’t let me engage, although at the time I had 7 sats and good CMR age and through put. On 4 occasions I was dropped from the server. All but one time the program reconnected by itself. And a few times it would disengage because of low quality info. One issue with the equipment, even though I bought an expensive powered cradle for the phone, it wiggled loose one time and wasn’t charging and consequently shut down and the whole show came to a grinding halt.
I’m running variable rate on the planter as well but this is controlled by a separate PF3000 with it’s own beacon receiver. A little redundancy doesn’t hurt. This made loss of RTK inconvenient but not a tragedy. I’m also still dropping the markers each pass because occasionally I have to grab the wheel. Maybe I’m missing it in setup but I wish the 500 would give an audible warning when it disengages steering because of poor signal.
If I do another set up this way I would probably forget the phone and go with one of the aircards. The phone is cheaper monthly, but it just adds another layer unnecessarily. I like the dedicated Carputer and the power on/off options, but you could probable buy 3 of the netbook pcs, or 10 old notebooks off ebay with enough computing power to run the GNSS software for what I have in my system.
While it’s not perfect, I’m happy enough with how it’s working now, a lot better than WAAS. When I get to the point when I need 100% on – RTK, however, I’ll be looking for something a little more reliable.
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Planting on Iowa CORS
