Especially with L1 only, you need to have a good view of the sky, ie no obstructions. Also dont forget your ground plane. It really helps speed things up by placing a piece of metal under the antenna position.
You do know that you need to fill in the base Lat/Lon/Height in DMS and not in meters from a projected system? Just checking!
Also, you should have GLONASS available in Europe, so I would suggest enabling them to give yourselves more data to work with.
Post processing is an essential task. Getting it right is important especially since the 3DR radios only have a few km range at best (clear line of site) and for real world purposes will only work a few km. Solely relying on RTK in the field is a bit shortsighted as obstacles will nearly always come up and having a backup methodology is just good survey practice.
I know that @igor.vereninov is planning to issue a Post Processing workflow at some stage and would suggest that you follow that. We did (and continue to do) post processing work with great success using only the Reach and RTKLIB on a PC.
For all intensive purposes, our RTKLIB post processing configs are default, with exception of the file paths and satellite constellations. Raw data was collected for 60s or more at each point, downloaded from Reach in UBX (we prefer to convert to RINEX on the PC) and processed for each instance.
Fully agree the antenna is playing a key role ! For GNSS L1 the best approach is to use VRS but when you are moving out that Virtual Reference Station you will fall again in the “normal” single baseline RTK … The far you are the more errors will affect your results. You could fix the coordinates for getting a VRS station in the centre of your area (and introducing these coordinates instead of getting them from GGA single position). That will help to mitigate the errors effects.
Luke,
Thank you for being a great communicator. Your posts and experience are very valuable and useful and will be helpful to me when my RTK Reach Kit arrives. I plan on using the RFD900 radios as my surveyors recommendation for our use in Louisiana, US because of the forests and need to get a signal back to the base unit.
Have you found a case for your reach devices yet? The picture you posted makes me think that a case to protect the board from damage is a good idea.
Rabun
Thanks for your kindness but I am definitely not a wordsmith!
I am strggling with the range offered by the RFD900 even at full power. In dense vegetation and over hills, I get very patchy reception. I feel that 1W is not sufficient for our work and that the polarization of the antenna only makes it worse. I have been playing about with a mobile data slution that work really well. After some more testing, I will post about it with a how to guide.
I find that the Reach gets really hot over time, so I try yo shield it from the sun under the ground plane in the shade and attach it with velcro. But it is not a permanent solution with dust and water being possible contaminants. I hear that Emlid are planning a case in the future. Perhaps some one with 3d design skills can share a STL file for us to 3d print? We printed some mounts for a plumbing bubble and head attachment for the antenna, but bit yet for the Reach.
Luke,
Again, as a land surveyor, you are probably well ahaed of the Reach crowd because of your experience in field work. Regardless you are well ahead of me. I am a GIS guy with a passion for accuracy taught me by my surveyor.
He has built his own radios and can successfully communicate between stations. In most of his work he does not use them but lesser radios. He still struggles with getting signals out of the dense pine forests that surround our area.
He is thinking at present about using a drone to get the locked position he needs in some of these near impossible situations. That in itself is complicated and needs a solution as well.
Our state, Louisiana, has an RTK radio network but the annual fee for using it precludes all but professional land surveyors and engineers from using it. It costs $3500 per year to use it.
Looks like we will need to wait on a case for the Reach devices as you said.
Thanks, Ray
Sry for bumping this one.
Clearify amp consumption. I use batterybank with 1amp max output. I know spec says 500mah with no other load then reach. Would i benefit something with 2amp output from batterybank?
Does reach have any high peak values during some tasks?
