Battery problem with Reach RS Base unit

My Reach RS base has not had the same battery life that my Rover has. Yesterday the battery life on the Rover was right at 70% and the battery life (per ReachView app) on the Base unit was right at 50%. Within an hour the Base unit powered down. I powered it back up shortly after booting it powered off again.

I have been charging it all night and it has never reached a full charge. I use Drok USB Meter when charging my USB devices to monitor charging. The battery has never reached a “full charge” as the meter still shows it is receiving a charge (at a rate of 0.113 W. The capacity level is at 06797 and it just keeps climbing). When good batteries reach full charge it will display 0.0 for a power output. It has been charging for about 9 hours.

How long are the batteries warranted for? I have not opened up the unit to look but I have to believe that swapping the battery should be a relatively simple task. Any insight will be appreciated.

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Battery did fully charge. Took about 11 hours. But I still have the issue that the Reach RS kept powering down with about 50% showing on battery level. That is not good.

How long have you had them? Sounds like a typical condition for an old battery. One issue I have with the Reach is that the battery is not swappable. I’m sure they wouldn’t be too hard to take apart and replace, but…

Got them early last year. I am not sure what the warranty on them is? So the battery is not the point of needing desperate repair, but there is still something not right with it. I guess time will tell more.

Perhaps the charge circuit had been fooled into thinking your partially charged battery was ‘full’.

If a 100% reading was actually half charged, then a 50% reading is totally discharged. That would explain why it might power off when it still shows 50%.

So if that is what happened, then charging up it until it couldn’t take any more should get it acting normally again.

What about trying a discharge test if you know you won’t be using them for a few days? Hit ‘reset settings to default’ on both to make them configured the same. Make sure they are logging (so you can look and see what time each one powered down). See if they last for ~30 hours.

Hi.
Something similar happened to me with one of my antennas, rs.
What I do not know is if the problem was solved with an update or simply by charging my antenna while it is off.

You can try charging your antenna during the night but do not turn it on.

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Thanks @bide I will do that. Your suggestion does bring up a question. When I am done logging at a site, I will go to the Logging section, and turn the logging off. Down below you will see it read “Processing”. If you have been logging for a a while, say 2-4 hours, it can take up to 10 seconds to finish Processing the log. So my question is this, when you just turn the unit off with the power button and it is still logging, does it still complete this “Processing” or is that bypassed? I am not sure what is being processed other than closing out the write function of the file.

So if the unit ran for 30 hours and then finally turned off due to dead battery. Would it “Process” the file before powering down?

Something else that would be real nice is if we could setup “Profiles”. Then I could hit Reset for what ever reason (ie doing the test you mentioned) and then when done, load Profile 1, or Profile 2. The benefit of Profiles would be:

  1. Easily share profile with new users to get them up and running on a particular setup
  2. Easily change between setups (ie PPK on my Drone - GPS only | Regular Survey - GPS and Glonass, etc
  3. RTK Session via Ntrip vs No RTK.

So now with one click you load all settings you need for that session and not have to go screen to screen. I think it would be very nice :slight_smile: Just a thought for Emlid.

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I think if the system has been asked to shutdown, then it will terminate any running processes. That means my guess is that all running processes including log file conversion process would be told to terminate immediately.

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the great suggestion! It sounds really interesting and useful, we’ll consider adding it in our future releases.

In regards to the battery issue you’ve experienced, it seems strange to me. Reach battery has a lot of recharging cycles, so it’s unlikely that the battery life is just reduced.

Looking forward to seeing the result of the test suggested by @bide.

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