GIS Data collection for proprietary ESRI...

GPS/GNSS Development Boards
1

Hello, let me start with admitting I have no idea where to post this. My apologies.

TL;DR @ end

We do environmental site inspections and clean ups, and I am trying to get this company out of measuring things off the corners of buildings and printing things on paper, I currently have to drive abound with anywhere from 5 to 15 3" binders…

We picked up the L-band unit, and it rocks. Even though we are in Alaska and the PointPerfect service is not available yet, the NTRIP via mobile device gets our accuracy down to 1 cm. But that depends on what mobile apps we use. The mobile device is a Pixel 5 with android 12, and using NTRIP Client from Lefebure and the SW Maps NTRIP client will produce this amazing accuracy. So the hard wear rocks! Thank you SparkFun!

The problem is getting the ridiculously accurate data into ESRI software. I spoke with the developer from Lefebure and went back and found that ESRI requires NMEA 4.0 data, witch is why his software is not even recognized as a GPS device (in mock location of course).

Now the SW Maps, in mock location, does create data that ESRI will ingest. But there is an issue… ESRI software will flip on/off the internal mobile gps antenna in rhythm with the NTRIP data rate. So the accuracy jumps from 1.2 cm to 6.5 m as the location is corrected, very strobe like.

I have reached out to SW Maps to see if they know how or if this is something that can be fixed. ESRI was no help at all and said they don’t have many customers asking for cm collected data input into their products from the field.

TL:DR

Does any one know of an NTRIP Client that will out put NMEA 4.0 or better data for use with ESRI mobile products on android? (Field Maps)

Thank you in advance,

Jesse

2

I wanted to ask if y’all made any progress on this? We’d like to buy a few of these, but the only hold up is trying to establish if they’ll work with Field Maps.

Much appreciated,
Alex

3

Is it a NMEA 4.x issue?

Back in the day we just added digits to the DDDMM.mmmmmm to the fractional portion of the minutes.
Early GPS had it to 4dp (18.5 cm), uBlox has it to 5dp, and I think we (NavSync / Parthus) had it to 6dp, which is around 0.2cm for the Sharpe XR6 RTK units, and subsequent receiver firmwares.
People using broken/rigid parsers had issues, but those using more flexible ones, with floating point doubles, did not.
You can tweak the uBlox output via the NMEA-HIGHPREC setting, which has minutes to 7dp and height to 3dp.
The NTRIP Client should just spit back whatever the receiver is outputting.
Don’t use 32-bit floats for latitude/longitude, they can hold 8-9 digits total.