RTK issue

Clive · Sep 24, 2015

Pheasant Surprise said:
You need to give it a name to remember like 'wavy line field' or 'black alien field'

it's rubbish land, an old opencast that was once the biggest hole in Europe I believe - begining to think maybe they did burry a alien spaceship there before it got backfilled !!

Gpsvince · Sep 24, 2015

Hi Clive, is it the whole field or just the prominent area in the middle?
No sats at all?
or just loss of base comms?

GPSVince

Northern farmer · Sep 24, 2015

Gpsvince said:
Hi Clive, is it the whole field or just the prominent area in the middle?
No sats at all?
or just loss of base comms?

GPSVince

Earlier on he says "it is not the RTK radio signal issue", must be some sort of interference on the GNSS frequencies then.

Clive · Sep 24, 2015

Gpsvince said:
Hi Clive, is it the whole field or just the prominent area in the middle?
No sats at all?
or just loss of base comms?

GPSVince

its a 300ac block of land in about 10 fields, top of a hill, vert few trees or hedges etc. its not in any one place and comes and goes throughout the day. as far as I'm told its looses all sats but keeps RTK signal, this is on 3 different RTK / topcon equipped machines and the LH ago van, when one drops they all drop as, sometimes they recover and have sats back in seconds and sometimes it take a couple of mins

Clive · Sep 24, 2015

Northern farmer said:
Earlier on he says "it is not the RTK radio signal issue", must be some sort of interference on the GNSS frequencies then.

thats right, RTK still has a count and we have had the same issues when we swapped to network RTK instead of radio to try and isolate the problem

Gpsvince · Sep 24, 2015

10 fields! might be worth checking with a Garmin or TomTom just to see that all GNSS receivers are affected, possible burst of microwave transmission, the sort they use to communicate between cell towers, the fact that it is on top of a hill points to interference, is it possible to hide behind a wood or a barn, that has given me some directional info in the past.
Place a receiver in a grain trailer, steel walls on all sides but open to the sky.
This is a tough one! I would first check some other brands of receivers, eliminate one thing at a time.
Can you switch to Egnoss on one receiver, see if it suffers the same drop outs
No Magic wand!

principal skinner · Sep 24, 2015

Are you using GLONASS sats too? How many sats are you seeing when it drops out?

T Hectares · Oct 10, 2015

I'm having this same issue on a block of land that has previously worked fine for the last 4 years, and fine up until Thursday.

Auto section on egnos wouldn't work and drilling tractor on SF2 having same issues.

Had to drill the field manually this morning

Both machines picking up plenty of sattellites and full strength signal and are both working ok around the rest of the farm, the autosteer is the issue, the lightbar across the top of the screen is fine and VRA is ok.

Did you get any answers @Clive ??

Teejay · Oct 10, 2015

I went to my problem field this week and my lightbar guidence still wont work in that field. I think it must be the phone masts taking out the signal from the satelites.

Gpsvince · Oct 12, 2015

We had an issue a few years ago, there were a few more satellites that came on line, it exceeded the maximum permissible in the reciever, it needed a fix.
I am still interested in whether a cheap receiver can see the sats, Tom Tom or garmin.

Gpsvince · Oct 12, 2015

Thinking further on......try adjusting the mask angle up to say 30% that should cut out any poor data?

Thomas Simpson · Oct 12, 2015

We are having the same issue as well, one block of land with rtk dropping off only happened over the last year. Trimble gps on both tractors and dealers van within line of site of rtk base station about 6 miles away just drops off. We are below a big radar station and near another big military base, but has only happened over the last yr.

T Hectares · Oct 12, 2015

I've been back to this block today to finish drilling it, all back to normal !!

Pheasant Surprise · Oct 12, 2015

Gpsvince said:
We had an issue a few years ago, there were a few more satellites that came on line, it exceeded the maximum permissible in the reciever, it needed a fix.
I am still interested in whether a cheap receiver can see the sats, Tom Tom or garmin.

The Chinese keep launching and commissioning more and more BeiDou satellites, that they've now embarrassed the Europeans dragging their heels with Galileo, and will probably have a fully working constellation over Europe sooner. Still don't think we can blame the Chinese for this!

How many channels and amt of memory did those older receivers have? Must have been precious few if a couple of new sats jammed up the receivers!

Gpsvince · Oct 13, 2015

They were legacy receivers, I think it was about 12 in view (US) and on a good day you could exceed that.
Although I agree, the additional posts seem to point to ground based interference.

PSQ · Oct 13, 2015

Pheasant Surprise said:
The Chinese keep launching and commissioning more and more BeiDou satellites, that they've now embarrassed the Europeans dragging their heels with Galileo, and will probably have a fully working constellation over Europe sooner. Still don't think we can blame the Chinese for this!

Sorry to hijack, but is the Beidou satellite service available in the UK?! My 3 Trimbles give me the option to select them, but I haven't tried it to see if they are available. Would be interesting to add them to the 18 satellites that we usually see at any one time through both EGNOS and GLONASS (RTX Rangepoint).

Pheasant Surprise · Oct 13, 2015

PSQ said:
Sorry to hijack, but is the Beidou satellite service available in the UK?! My 3 Trimbles give me the option to select them, but I haven't tried it to see if they are available. Would be interesting to add them to the 18 satellites that we usually see at any one time through both EGNOS and GLONASS (RTX Rangepoint).

I'm hoping to get new receiver here up and running here this week that has BeiDou reception capability, so can't say for sure, but have seen press (18 months old or more) that says 4 or more BeiDou sats should be visible 40-50% of the time in Europe/UK. They launched 2 new satellites back in July, apparently and these look to be coming on stream soon, so should be even better coverage.

The Europeans had some bad luck with the 2 Galileo sats that got launched into the wrong orbit by faulty rocket...but where the Europeans have generally fumbled with Galileo as a project, the Chinese have quietly gone about their business expanding their global constellation. Its good for us users, the more satellites up there the better.

Pheasant Surprise · Nov 28, 2015

PSQ said:
Sorry to hijack, but is the Beidou satellite service available in the UK?! My 3 Trimbles give me the option to select them, but I haven't tried it to see if they are available. Would be interesting to add them to the 18 satellites that we usually see at any one time through both EGNOS and GLONASS (RTX Rangepoint).

Had a quick look today at the skyplot on my receiver:

2 to 3 Beidou satellites visible around midday. Not great when compared to GPS which had 11 visible at same time and GLONASS which had 6 visible, but it's a start. Only the one lowly Galileo bird visible...

RTK issue

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