Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | This question came up a few days ago. I and at least one other poster replied to this. I make AB lines that are the field Edge or property lines and save them with distinctive names. We do not generally use boundaries although they certainly have their place. Our approach was go out with the planting tractor without an implment and drive the property line or edge when possible.
Sometimes it was not possible to drive this line due to obstacles such as road ditches, utility poles etc. We measured and found that the outside edge of the outer front duals is 5' from the center of that tractor. Our GPS is centered on the tractor but we would temporarily enter in a 5' offset to the right and drive along the edge with the left outer front dual at the edge of the desired line.
So depending on the situation we either 1) drove the actual line with an offset of zero or 2) drove paralel to the line with the outer front left tire and an offset of 5' to the right. We drove all fields in a clockwise fashion. This meant that all fields had at least four AB lines defining their property line or edges.
When planting, we must be certain to have set the GPS offset back to zero. We then choose the planting configuration and the appropriate "edge" line which has been saved and named with a distinctive descriptive name. The system will suggest a shift value, we disregard the suggestion and enter a value one half the width of the planter in the direction we wish the first AB line to shift. We then let auto steer do the steering on the first outer pass. That line can be saved with its own distinctive name for future use.
I exported all these lines to a USB stick and saved them on my office computer for future use should the lines on the display get deleted. These lines can be used as our base "edge" lines. Anytime we perform an operation in the field we can use them as a starting reference and shift half the implement width for our first pass.
Another poster explained how he uses his boundary lines in the SMS software to create his "edge" AB lines and then exports them from SMS to a USB Stick to get them into his display. I have not attempted that approach which he said works well.
Our approach did take some time prior to planting but hopefully will continue to work for us into the future. We used straight AB line where practical. We needed to use curved AB lines in some situations.
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Ag Leader auto steer, making paths parallel to the boundary?
