Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
This is something I still haven't worked out how to do properly. With strip tillage we often can't see where the headland tram-line which makes spraying around the edges of fields accurately quite difficult.
Last summer I tried to get our Topcon system to autosteer round the boundary. I first started by driving right around the edge of the field by running the edge of one wheel right on the boundary that I wanted to spray. I put an offset in of half the width of the tractor and put the swatch width at 12m minus the tractor half-width.
That didn't really work because going right round the edge of the field meant that you were driving underneath trees and the RTK kept dropping out meaning the boundary was not accurate (and then in turn the headland guidance line wasn't accurate).
In some fields where our 8m drill had drilled the fields I was reasonably content to drive round the tramlines it left and map out the boundary from there. This isn't perfect though because occasionally we had drilled to close too the ditch and I wanted to correct that but couldn't.
The worse cases were where we had strip-tilled, not put in a headland tramline (because the multiple 3m drill passes mean it's never accurate enough, and pre-em you couldn't see it anyway). Then you didn't have the option of mapping from the tramlines, the driving right round the edge of the field tactic didn't work and so I was a bit stumped..
In the end I drove round the field ridiculously slowly with the sprayer unfolded to map the headland guidance line. This again isn't perfect because it takes ages, and if you make a mistake (which I did a lot), then you have to start all over again.
There must be a better way! How do you do it?
Last summer I tried to get our Topcon system to autosteer round the boundary. I first started by driving right around the edge of the field by running the edge of one wheel right on the boundary that I wanted to spray. I put an offset in of half the width of the tractor and put the swatch width at 12m minus the tractor half-width.
That didn't really work because going right round the edge of the field meant that you were driving underneath trees and the RTK kept dropping out meaning the boundary was not accurate (and then in turn the headland guidance line wasn't accurate).
In some fields where our 8m drill had drilled the fields I was reasonably content to drive round the tramlines it left and map out the boundary from there. This isn't perfect though because occasionally we had drilled to close too the ditch and I wanted to correct that but couldn't.
The worse cases were where we had strip-tilled, not put in a headland tramline (because the multiple 3m drill passes mean it's never accurate enough, and pre-em you couldn't see it anyway). Then you didn't have the option of mapping from the tramlines, the driving right round the edge of the field tactic didn't work and so I was a bit stumped..
In the end I drove round the field ridiculously slowly with the sprayer unfolded to map the headland guidance line. This again isn't perfect because it takes ages, and if you make a mistake (which I did a lot), then you have to start all over again.
There must be a better way! How do you do it?
Last edited: