I build autonomous tractors and I have been using their internal GPS receivers to survey fields. It’s far from exact to try to line a tractor with a 20’ implement up against a property line/pole/etc. For me, the frequent result is that I stray where I don’t want to be or I’m overly cautious and leave big gaps.
Yesterday I clamped the Reach RS to my ATV rack and drove around a field I need to plant. Then I brought the RS home and ran the logs through GPSbabel to get a GPX file for QGIS. It works so well!
I’m trying to finish planting that field today and I ran into a couple drainage tile holes. Rather than line up the tractor with each one, I had the tractor resume planting and I placed the RS in each hole to get a position. I then sent off the positions to my tile repair folks.
Some suggestions/requests:
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It would be handy to have GPX logging. I can use GPSbabel without much effort but I’m recommending this to folks for whom this is an impediment.
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I’d like to have a way to quickly cut and paste the current location from the Web interface. It would be ideal to have a link to Google for the current location. Then I could easily share it.
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It would help me to be able to trigger a logging event using the (power) button. That would allow me to, for example, just log the vertices of a field boundary, or each tile hole so that I wouldn’t have to sift through the captured data to find the points I want.
Nice job! The RS is slick. I’m already starting to tell people they need to have these.