RS2 as permanent base station with SNIP NTRIP caster

[ianlawton11487 (Ian Lawton)]

A friend of mine is looking to setup a RS2 as a permanent base station, we need it to use a relay stream over the internet to the server running SNIP NTRIP caster software, I would like to know if this is possible, Thanks, Ian

[anastasiia.iusupova]

Hi Ian!

The workflow that you described should work fine.

Reach RS2 can be connected to the NTRIP caster directly, in this case, there’s no need in TCP connection.

Also, Reach RS2 can send its position via TCP to a server with a public IP address. In this case, you should configure the Position output and specify the port number. Please, check this section in our docs for more details.

[ianlawton11487 (Ian Lawton)]

The rs2 will be 15 km away from the server, so we need to put it through a relay stream over tcp

[Africawaterdoc]

Hi Ian,

I recently experimented with setting up an RS2 As a base station using snip-lite as a caster. There was a small learning curve as I’m new to snip and I set it up on a VM on Microsoft’s Azure platform (so there were cloud computing considerations in the configuration). It worked great once I got it up and running. It can definitely work if the server is located 15km from the base as long as the base has access to internet (I’m located 1000’s of km from the server and my correction delay is often less than 3s on my rover). A few notes:

1. setting up the base to connect to snip was simple, there is a section in the ReachView base tab where you indicate the NTRIP Server to connect to and name the mount point. This connection was direct to the caster over the internet and set up in snip on the ‘caster’ Tab. I’m not sure about the use case you mention of setting up as a ‘relay stream’ as I understood from the snip documentation that a relay stream is used when you want to connect a snip Server to another Snip server (or other RTCM server).

2. I used a SIM card with a data connection over 3G to connect with the server. But it should work fine if you wanted to connect the base over WiFi as well.

3. you’ll need to consider what rover devices you intend to connect to this mount point. RS2 connects great to other RS2s and and should work with other multi frequency, multi constellation, devices As long as they can use the L2C (GPS) code and use MSM4 messages for corrections. But if your client rovers require P code GPS corrections or legacy RTCM messages, they may have problems using this base. I think are some advanced features of snip that can add legacy messages, but this was beyond my use case so I didn’t look into it (my NTRIP was for RS2 to RS2)

4. I ran into a problem when I tried to set up snip with a password for the rover. Snip gave an error that it could see a connection attempt from the rover RS2, but that it was blocked by the operating system for using a deprecated version of TLS (encryption). My preliminary look at this problem was that this was likely because I had installed snip on a VM that included the latest build of windows 10, which disabled connections with the version of TLS used by the RS2. One solution would have been to redo the VM with a server version of Windows that allowed older TLS encryptions, but since I only use NTRIP when I set up the base to go to the field, I decided it wasn’t really necessary to password protect the rover connection in my case. Turning off the password protection for the rover worked right away.

5. The RS2 requires a special power cable (from Emlid) for a permanent installation. Just mentioning it here in case you are new to the RS2 and plan to purchase.

If your friend is well versed in using snip, then the RS2 should be easy to use as a base.