Working in a very rural area of upper midwest state. Very few people, just huge ranches and farms. I have two R10's which I am using as RTK bases. It has an Ntrip caster built in. I place the base in a location with good cell service (AT&T sim card). Rover is similarly in an area with good cell service (strong signal). Close to the nearest city, works fine. Further out (away from cities) , it seems to be OK, initializes immediately, but when I start an occupation, it will often say "No base data" after 20 or 30 seconds. Check the signal strength at base and rover, both very good. Restart, same thing. Happens over and over. The only way I can get to store an occupation is by watching the data age page, and when it starts going up, store the point. The repeat occupations are excellent, as to be expected as there is not a tree in sight for miles. I note that this mostly happens when in an occupation, in between it seems to maintain the fix and be in the mm range for precision.
So at first I thought it was a receiver or data collector problem. But we have two R10's, and two R8 rovers, one with a TSC3 and the other with a Yuma (both Trimble access 2017.10). Similar situation with both pairs when away from the populated areas. Seemed to work OK early in the day, then get worse as the day goes on.
I am thinking that the cell towers are so sparse out here, and the few people that are here probably use cell as their internet access, so the network is possibly overloaded. Does this sound reasonable? Anyone ever experienced this? Of course AT&T is not going to admit that their network is overloaded, nor could I possibly find the right person there to tell me that. At the rover I have both AT&T (microhard modem) and Verizon (cell phone hotspot, similar problem. And the Yuma has a built in verizon modem.
I have never experienced this before in other areas.
The only other reason I can think of is that there is a problem with Trimble Access, but the fact that it seems to work fine near the cities makes me suspect the network.
I would have thought the opposite would be true, in regards to the urban/rural setting. Are you having to redial your NTRIP on these occasions ?
Generally when we intermittently lose base data it re-establishes fairly quickly without dropping the phone connection.
It could be that the rural towers have a slower/poorer connection to the internet to begin with.
Could it be that rural areas are 2G, 3G - we get that a lot here and in NZ.
I thought about the 2G thing, but SUPPOSEDLY AT&T turned off all 2G. But that is a possibility.
I was hoping someone else has experienced this. I did report this to my dealer, who was going to contact Trimble, it could be some kind of bug, but I doubt that it would not have come to light before.
I doubt if it's Access, we would have seen it. I tend to agree that it's probably because a lot of people are using cellular for internet, and whether they admit it or not, AT&T may be throttling users who are streaming data.
Are you using XFill on your R10 rovers?
The gps data stream is extremely small, I would tend to think there is poor quality in the cell network versus a data overload.
When the network starts parsing out large downloads it can delay your correction signal. Those downloading a lot of data live with it but if you do not get a correction signal immediately it is useless. Real Time Kinematic needs real time.
Paul in PA
I am working in N Calif. this week, similar thing on T-mobile, I have to disconnect and reconnect to kick start the data stream, pretty rural area and semi spotter cell signal, I dunno, I do kind of feel like data streams may be throttled? I am running my own base with a RTK Bridge which has a built in server, so not going through a RTN, all my gear except of course the cell towers.
SHG
Shelby: sounds like what is happening here, stop and restart. And Gavin, thanks for your insight as well. I had done some searching, and found various people saying that AT&T used to be super fast, same as Verizon, but now the difference is very noticeable. My cell phone and tablet are both verizon, I don't see the same problems, although I will say that where I was the last two days (in the mountains, heavily forested) Verizon has much less coverage than AT&T.
Of course I checked the online coverage maps, both carriers show the areas as totally covered, which is a LIE