I’m not sure what the best practice here would be for you.
There are several ways to do the job, and it depends on what hardware you have available to you, and how much time you want to spend preparing and running the job.
For a single static RS2+ base over your surveyor’s known point outputting an NTRIP stream to your drone’s controller, you’re going to need some way to relay the NTRIP stream to the further reaches of your area. If you’ve no cell coverage then you’re going to have to try using one (or more!) wifi-router/repeaters. GL.iNet make several different versions which you can power from usb batteries, or from an internal battery. The Routers can use cell sim cards to access 3g/4g, but can also work to create a stand-alone WiFi network without a sim. The repeater range varies from model to model. The Router I use manages about a 50-100m radius (depending on what’s blocking the signal at each end). You’d need to set the routers to create their own WiFi bridging network, then overlap each router’s area until you’ve reached your other take-off/flying zones. In this scenario, you’d first create the Router WiFi network and get everything up & connected, then start up the RS2+ and connect it to that router WiFi network. Then you’d start up your RC and have it connect to the RS2+ via the Router WiFi.
RS2+ - GL.Inet WiFi - GL.Inet WiFi - Gl…iNet Wifi - RC Controller < drone.
FWIW, I nearly always use a GL.Inet portable router to act as a central hotspot now. I’ve found it to be far less hassle to get everything connected than using the RS3’s hotspot, or my phone’s hotspot. If I don’t use the GL.iNet I find I can end up spending 15-20 mins trying to get everything talking to each other as the RC can get grumpy about the order things join the WiFi network. With the GL.iNet I simply make sure it’s the first thing turned on, then everything else simply finds it and connects when they’re turned on later. It makes it a lot easier to keep the drone in sight during a flight too as it frees you up to walk further away from the RS base without having to worry too much about losing the WiFi and having the NTRIP stream drop out.
A different way would be to use two RS units in base-rover (using LoRa or other radio) configuration to lay out several ‘known’ points across your survey area. Some of those points would be utilised for GCP’s and CP’s, reserving one central point to act as your new local base. Then when you come to fly the drone, you setup your RS2+ as a Base with local NTRIP on that measured central point and fly all missions from that central base. This way both missions are working from a single common base, and both lots of data will be locally accurate to that point. You can then PPK that central base point if you wanted either to check its accuracy, or to recalculate it if you wanted. If you marked and photographed your surveyor’s original known point in the drone flight, you could also use that as a GCP/CP to help validate your in-flight data.
Yet another way is simply to ignore the surveyors point for now, set up your RS2+ base centrally, and fly the missions from there. Then PPK your RS2+'s position, and use that to PPK your drone data. You could also occupy the known point with your RS2+ and take some additional static readings from it, PPK’ing them to obtain a fixed point and then seeing what difference you get in readings from the surveyor’s known point. In some drone PPK software, you can then offset the drone readings to bring them in line with the known point.
A final way is to set out several GCP/CP’s around the survey area and take static readings for each those points - you’d then PPK each of these points later. Then fly your missions moving your local RS2+ NTRIP base between each mission. you can then ppk each separate base-Mission dataset individually, and then use the PPK’d GCP/CP’s in your modelling software to conform the model to the GCP locations.
I’m sure someone else will chime in with some extra do’s and don’ts for each of those scenarios - I’m bound to have missed something obvious!
Hope that doesn’t confuse you! It’s certainly a challenge to work out the best method for doing larger areas without access to the mobile networks.
(FWIW, I’ll be using a mixture of the base-rover lora gcps and static averaged gcps to do a survey for a very large heritage mine site. I’ve not quite figured the best method yet and probably will only be able to figure it out once I’ve walked the job first to see what areas get mobile or lora coverage, and what areas get nothing (lots of ghylls and hills). It’s probably going to take me at least four days, one just to walk it all first, then another day to set out and measure gcps and cps, then a couple of days to fly the sectors. I’ve already spent at least a day looking at the maps and trying various mission configs in FlightHub2 as that will affect where I put the GCP’s.)