Reach + RFD900 radios


There’s lots of chatter in a few threads here which brought me to ask my (other) self the question, “How could we troubleshoot a situation when we are using a radio link and where the grey bars of the base are not showing a continuous, good signal?”

At the office, there is a short radio range and everything can appear good.
In the field, the conditions are often less than ideal, and when things aren’t working, we are more concerned about capturing the particular data set than doing radio troubleshooting.

I suppose that one could do his RTK work while also capturing raw logs for post-processing. If the RTK results are bad and the post-processing is good, that would shift the blame to the radios.

Currently this can be accomplished with 3 Reach devices, or by using my command-line workaround, or by waiting for this feature in Reachview, which, by the way, is on ReachView’s roadmap.

If the blame is then shifted to the radio, then another thing that could be done is to record a set of good quality base and rover logs, then play them back in real time with the RTCM3 portion going over the radio link and see what happens to the quality of the solution data versus the post-processed original. Of course the logs could be compared for quality as well.

Another idea which could be implemented, is to send a file with known contents across the radio link, and compare it on the other end. For example, a copy of this file is on each Reach device. Say the file is in RTCM3 format and it contains 100 RTCM3 messages. The file is is sent over the radio link, at a certain pace, to another Reach. There it is compared to the original file and scored for the number of identical RTCM3 messages received, and for the correct timing of those messages. This whole process could be automated with, let’s say, a “receive RTCM3 test file” button on the rover, and a “send RTCM3 test file” on the base, and a percentage score displayed at the end of the test. Something like this might even be paired with another feature for changing radio settings :wink:


(@Juan_Diaz I wrote this post before I read of your latest tweaks, so I am hoping your tests turn out to be successful!)