I’m an electrical engineer so I know enough to be dangerous, but I’ve never used any kind of “high precision geolocation” instrumentation. My situation is that I bought some land up in Allenspark, CO, and to get it officially surveyed will cost $10k. I don’t need to know the edges to any kind of legal precision, I just want to get an approximate layout. BTW, there is one treeless south-facing slope but some of the edges are either tree-covered, and some are north-facing.
If I can find out the lat/lon of the corners of my land, can a newbie like me use the RTK Facet to locate those points with that 30 cm accuracy? And if so, what other equipment do I need to purchase to make it work?
I’m an electrical engineer so I know enough to be dangerous.
Says every EE before embarking on a good project.
You are speaking my language. The entire RTK product line started because I needed to map a 2 acre parcel for a “some day” ridable miniature railway in Park county, CO.
The platinum option is the new RTK Facet L-Band (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/20000). It will just work without any internet connectivity or a radio link but it’s $1500.
Another good option is two RTK Expresses kits (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18380) and a radio link. The radio link (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19032) is the current thorn in everyone’s side. The chip is EOL’d and the supply is running out globally. It will be a few months (6?) before we have a good alternative.
Do you have WiFi or cellular coverage where you need to survey? If you did, then you can skip the radio link. I would setup an RTK Express (or cheaper, ESP32 + ZED-F9P: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ho … p-option-2) at the home or whatever has WiFi, and the 2nd rover RTK Express would use cellular (or WiFi) to connect over NTRIP.
Sorry, there’s a lot of acronyms in there but hopefully it will get you some good google results. Please keep asking questions!
Option #E. On a regular basis, I see 150 to 250mm accuracy using any of our RTK products in Rover mode (no base, no corrections, no radio link). These are incredible GNSS receivers so if you need 300mm accuracy, skip the headache and just use an RTK Express kit with the good, included TOP106 GNSS antenna and you’d be very good. North, south facing, tree coverage, all ok. As long as there’s no rain forest canopy in Allenspark that I’m not aware of, you will get very good accuracy.
Looking at the description for the RTK Express Kit, it says “We generally recommend using your cellular phone as the radio backhaul for RTCM but you can also use your own, higher power radios as long as they support 57600bps”. Most of the cellular providers admit they don’t cover Allenspark; Verizon claims they do but recent tests (and checking with locals) shows that there is no cellular coverage at all. It looks like RTCM is what gets me DGPS (and 14 mm accuracy), just out of curiosity, what does this “higher power radio” look like (sounds like a religious artifact of some sort)?
Correct, if you want 14mm RTK, you need two units for a base/rover setup with a radio between them. These are the radios: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19032 and they are fairly common (ebay, amazon, etc) but the ones we sell ‘just plug in’ while other vendors may use other connectors or pinouts.