Howdy, forgive me in advance, I am pretty much clueless when it comes to this stuff. I work for a pretty large water district who is intentionally pursuing GIS data collection using Facet L-Band and Diamond Maps. I saw the Point Perfect subscription was being removed in December which leads me to my question (we currently have 5 facets and will be getting more). How would I go about setting up an RTK base station, so that we can get that similar accuracy we get with point perfect.
Welcome @Matthew_Kruse! Will you have cellular reception? If yes, I recommend switching from L-Band to NTRIP. I can walk you through that. It’s ~$15/unit per month (a lot less than L-Band).
If you want to setup your own base, the hardware is as simple as an RTK Surveyor setup in your office connected to power and internet 24/7. There’s a handful of steps to get the base configured, but if the kit is ~$600. So $600 / ($15 * 5) = 8 means the base will pay itself off in about 8 months. The downside is that your surveying units (aka, Rovers) will need to be within ~50km or 30 miles of the Base. If they are out of that range, the corrections can be too low quality for the Rover to get an RTK Fix. A Base can handle hundreds of Rovers, so you can add as many as you need over time.
So, if you’ve got cellular coverage, I recommend switching to NTRIP from PointPerfect. It’s the path of least resistance and pretty cheap at $15/month. You can roam all over the US 48 without coverage issues.
If you’ve got cellular coverage, and can handle the admin of a base, we’ll dive into the details to get you there.
If you don’t have cellular reception, then we have to start talking about Startlink internet but let’s not go there yet.
We have cell coverage in most areas, it does get spotty in some areas. 30 miles would cover us if I set up the base in an central area of our system. So I’m pretty interested in the Base option. Does the base option need reliable cell coverage as well?
Got it. The base station needs only an internet connection.
Please give this section Creating a Permanent Base a read. The points to take away:
- you have to mount an antenna permanently to a structure
- configure the RTK device to gather raw data to an SD card for 12 to 24 hours
- register a caster with RTK2Go, Emlid, and/or Onocoy
- configure the RTK device to be in Base mode and transmit its corrections to the caster
Once those things are in place, all the Rovers will use NTRIP to connect to RTK2Go, Emlid, or Onocoy to get the corrections from your Base.
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10-4,
I see I need a rover (Facet) to collect the raw data but once that data is collected, can that rover can go back in the field? Where does the RTK Surveyor come in?
You need some additional equipment (I recommended an RTK Surveyor kit above) to be a base. The base sits at your office until the end of time, connected to the internet. All your Rovers (Facets) then receive the correction signal from the Base while they’re in the field.
How level does the base antenna need to be? I’m planning on mounting the antenna on or near the peak of our roof, and depending on how level it needs to be makes my job harder. Also we’ve got a 40’ tower near by that will stick up past the antenna about 20’ is this a problem?
I’d say less than ~30 degrees of inclination. It doesn’t have to be super level, but it helps. More important is the fix stability: if the antenna rocks back and forth a few centimeters it will translate that directly as a few centimeters of inaccuracy to the rovers. Bolt it to the roof or use a good mag mount and you should be fine.
A 40’ tower nearby is not going to affect it much. Big buildings, mountains, maybe big trees are less than ideal, but should still work.
As an example, here is my base station in a mountain canyon:
The red/yellow around the edge shows the lack of reception as satellites drop behind the mountain range. The base still works fine, as do the rovers using it. It’s just less than ‘ideal’.
Ok, I have the RTK Surveyor setup and seems to be working. Emlid Caster shows it online and the 1cm and 100cm green lights are flashing along with bluetooth and pps.
Now I cannot figure out how to get the facet L-band to get better than 1ft of accuracy. I verified I input all the passwords and stuff correctly. but cannot get it to connect to the ntrip.
I figured out that I had to put the ntrip client stuff into diamond maps instead of configuring the unit, Thank you for your help.
Howdy, we have been using the RTK Surveyor base station for awhile now. It works great, but recently it has to be reset (turned off and back on) multiple times a day. The 1cm and 100cm lights will either stop flashing or just the 100cm light will stay constantly lit. Trying to figure out what the problem is.
I can testify that the new FLEX RTCM/NTRIP is working great, even in my deep woods. A point of clarification though, if your sky is completely covered by Pine Trees, you may fall back to RTK Float, however I did some more testing and if I let the receiver sit for 10 minutes or more it frequently returned to RTK FIX. Not always, but my testing currently is validating the $15 a month is worth 100x’s the previous PointPerfect MQTT in challenging areas!!!
It definitely works great. And is super quick. Works well under big powerlines too. The problem for me is it stops broadcasting. I don’t know if its a WiFi connectivity issue or its dropping its fix.
Has the battery been behaving, or is it dying more quickly than previous uses?
I have it constantly plugged in via usb-c
Sometimes the light does go from green to red and back to green.
The Blue Bluetooth light is always flashing along with the orange pps light. When it stops working, the 1cm or 100cm will stay constant on or neither of them will be on. When working correctly the 1cm and 100cm will alternate flashing.
Alright - if you disconnect usb-c does it stay powered on? If so, how long? I’m thinking something in the power circuit, perhaps the battery, is acting up
Hi @Matthew_Kruse - I have a RTK Surveyor operating in a shed in a rough environment that has been running very reliably for a few years. A few recommendations:
- From the System menu, set an automatic device reboot in minutes. I recommend 1440 minutes (24 hours). This will make the unit reset each night.
- What version of firmware are you running? As long as it’s v4.0 or above, you should be ok.
- Consider disconnecting the battery. In my installation, the power can go out for hours. If the RTK Surveyor’s battery gets fully depleted, and then the power comes back on, I’ve seen my unit enter a bad brown-out state where the battery is charging, and the system is trying to run at ~3.0V and gets locked up. Whereas, if the battery is disconnected, the system comes back on at a full 5V/3.3V and is able to run. My internet connection will stay up for about 30 minutes before parts of the link go down. You might have local WiFi, but does the cable operator down the line have days worth of battery backup? So having the battery inside the unit run for 10+ hours didn’t help and became an issue in the long run.
The multiple resets per day is odd. If these changes don’t make a difference, let us know and we can have you log for a day - this will tell us a lot more about what’s going wrong.
In general, I think the Surveyor is a fantastic option for long term base stations: it’s simple, with very little to break. With a little tuning, let’s get you there as well.
I have unplugged the usb-c from the surveyor. We will see how long it lasts! I got into settings and it is v4.2. I could not find where to set a device reboot. Help would be great…. I did try and update it unsuccessfully, but now that it is back up and running today it hasn’t messed up yet.