Mounting a Surveying Antenna to a Bulldozer Blade

GPS/GNSS
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Sparkfun itself is somewhat new to all of this as well, the facet was our first fully-enclosed RTK unit with an integrated antenna (AKA the first mostly Plug-and-play device we offered, release date was a bit under 3 years ago)

One of the problems with the designs that preceded it (surveyor, express, express plus) were the SMA connector’s robustness…it would work fine for stationary applications but fail under vibratory stresses…and products that do use SMA now have a much more solid SMA situation.

It’s been a learning process on our end, design-wise

As for customer service turnaround time, you are probably on-point…we have a standard 3-day turnaround for tickets, which probably doesn’t suit a full time operation’s strict needs…but we do our best! Other options often include service contracts and the like (which we currently do not offer)

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Pending official inspection by county officials, but every other layer has cleared. Despite the headaches, I know this road will last beyond what I would’ve contracted out. This road is within 1-2" in accuracy with the plans. I would say 1/2" but you couldn’t always trust the instruments on vertical height. On horizontal, it’s spot on, and you can see how straight it is with the Google Earth lines and satellite view.

The uncertainty of the vertical led me to make the 3/4" road mix layer from the called for 4" to 5-6" just to really make sure we don’t have any problems down the line. This 3/4" road mix could mean the difference between a 15 year and 30 year road.

AI helping with ongoing calculations + having this accuracy is great.

Also, RTK2go as a free service frequently had servers overloaded. I recommend if you’re a professional service, to figure out an alternate solution.

Maybe I’ll make a YouTube video. Maybe not. I just don’t think anyone is insane enough, has the time, and the amount of money to DIY.

The rest of my subdivision will be relying on the RTK devices despite the headaches. We are engineering 3D module to fit on top to minimize the stress on the antenna connector.

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