Crypto mining with Onocoy and RS2 - get rewarded by providing GNSS reference station data

There are several options for using the Geodnet ecosystem. You can buy a base station and get access to only your base station, which I consider to be practically useless. You can buy a base station and get paid in Geod tokens for having your base station online. This is what I do. Then you can purchase access to the entire Geodnet network for approximately $400 per year, which is also what I do. It took me about five months, starting in July of this year, to pay off the $700 I paid for the base station. Now anything I earn is profit over the initial investment.

Yes. Fully aware. That is why it was mentioned in my post! :wink:

These ecosystems appear a bit dubious.

Across Australia they are also pillaging the 700 odd sites of our national AUSCORS network…which are otherwise completely free.

At least those sites are robust geodetic installations with calibrated antenna’s that have been precisely coordinated & certified by our national science authority. So they would be capable of meeting the claimed 2cm on that GEODNET map.

But it also raises the question of potentially additional error accruing as a result of the extra latency of regurgitating that stream globally through their servers? For Onocoy that appears to be over to Europe and return, plus whatever latency from the additional processing in their system.

Maybe both cheaper and more accurate to consume directly from the source.

The “do it yourself” bases are clearly far from the same standard.

The Onocoy site only suggests a list of low-end receivers, and a “good quality” antenna. There does not appear to be any specific requirement for an IGS calibrated antenna with known parameters.

The only vague reference to integrity is a simple one liner saying that a bases “precise location” will be determined when its data is “validated” for quality over 24 to 36 hours. Plus helpful technical advice if you haven’t received validation after 36 hours to try moving the antenna and have another go.

It’s not explained what level of precision they actually achieve from said antennas, over only 24+ hours, and with only an NTRIP stream.

Oncoy also state their coordinates are not plate fixed. They are provided in WGS84 G2296. If that is the case, it presents at least two questions and potential issues:

  1. Who has a controller and app that will handle the time dependent transformations, and who has sufficient understanding to do the calculations and work with this manually? For example, our plate drift over here is 7 cm/year, that’s an additional 2cm to account for every 3 months.

  2. Like many national networks, our AUSCORS network that they are pillaging is coordinated in plate fixed GDA2020, not WGS84. How then are they continually doing the time dependent transformations before they resend if they are working in WGS84? And at what interval so how much error would one factor in and when? Same for every other national network…Or aren’t they?

So maybe not so Real Time Kinematic, rather for me Really Troubling Kinematic

There also appear to be other issues, for example exposed to fraudulent correction streams. They say they tackle this in a number of ways including “…consistency checks over mid-term periods.” It’s not clear how long these periods actually are, or if at the end of them you will actually be advised your collected data is corrupt.

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On monday there is a AMA session with a co-founder of Onocoy.
Jump into the Discord and put your bell notification on.