Fm 1000 work from base station

[back82]

We have a case fm 1000 running off someone else base station and are wondering whether it could be change to work from a sim card and what the cost would be, also if there are any disadvantages?

 

[seriddick]

Try @JimWilson @SoilEssentials we run 2 tractors with essential net and never had any trouble with signal. We work over a wide area and enables us rtk anywhere we work

 

[back82]

Thats great thanks i will look into it with them, we have been running off a friend base station but for some reason it has stopped working at our home farm, fine everywhere else, so was just looking into what our options where

 

[Niteforce]

I think iirc our DCM 300 modem was about £1250 then £750 / year for essentials net.

 

[JimWilson]

Thanks for the link @seriddick. and @Niteforce has kindly supplied the costs. The 2nd essentialsnet license is £650, 3rd is £550, etc...

See www.essentialsnet.co.uk

EssentialsNET has been running since 2009 so it's pretty mature, and there have been some significant improvements along the way. The perceived "weak link" in any RTK correction system relying on a mobile phone connection to is obviously the mobile phone signal, but that is a much smaller problem now than it used to be (see below for why)

In any RTK ( and other types are the same - eg RTX, Omnistar, egnos) correction service you have 2 systems running in tandem. If either system fails you have a problem. The 2 systems are:

1. GPS / Glonass. You need a minimum number of sats visible to get a RTK fix, but during times of low sat numbers or working close to trees etc, that could often be a major problem. Now many ( most?) people are using Glonass, it increases the number of visible sats, so its much less likely to be a problem.
2. The correction system. The tractor needs a data packet ideally once a second to correct it's position ( which it gets from GPS / Glonass) That data packet can get to the tractor in a number of ways. The most popular are mobile phone, satellite broadcast and radio. Essentialsnet uses mobile phone to go the last mile from the mobile tower to the tractor and we ( both soilessentials and the user) can't easily improve it. so there have been several improvements in order to make this more robust.
   1. Choose the correct network for your location. If you are working in 2 different areas and the best network is different, we can supply 2 different SIM cards.
   2. In really bad situations ( not common) we have built a dual sim modem which automatically chooses the most up to date correction packet coming in over the different networks. It obviously costs more in data charges as you are maintaining a connection to e.g. vodafone and EE at the same time, but it can solve difficult problems.
   3. But the big one is the emergence of dual frequency ( i.e. not EGNOS ) satellite based correction systems and their integration with tractor consoles running and receiving RTK corrections. There are 2 systems on the market that can do this. Trimble and JD. Each work in slightly different ways, but the basic effect is the same, in that if a RTK correction is lost ( from either radio or mobile phone) then software in the console ( called RTK extend from JD and XFill from Trimble) kicks in and allows the tractor to continue steering at very near RTK accuracy for about 20 minutes ( in the case of Trimble). As soon as you get the RTK signal back, you have another 20 minutes. It has been a game changer, and so far JD and Trimble have been the only ones to get this working as you need a lot of experience and global infrastructure to generate and broadcast the dual frequency correction signal. Interestingly, Essentialsnet works equally well on either JD or Trimble.

Sorry for the long winded explanation, but I read of people having problems with phone based RTK corrections, then find out they are not using one of the 2 market leaders above.

Obviously Essentialsnet can have problems as well, but with the changes detailed above, it's a pretty robust system now, as @seriddick says.

Jim

 

[GPS_Support_2014]

You could contact your dealer about the Case IH network:

http://www.caseih.com/emea/en-gb/news/pages/e-2015-02-23-next-level-precision-and-management.aspx