Harold's query re new equipment made me wonder how others fair with RTK via networks?
Here in Australia it's been around a while but still being added to.
However in our island state (Tasmania) it's very much in its infancy.
I was discussing this with a dealer and he said one of the main contenders had their site down for over a week. That would be extremely frustrating.
The costs are, like others said on Harold's post, something to account for.
I have a base and rover setup and whilst base setups are a concern I usually pick a location that I feel I can trust even if it means asking a local land owner for a quiet place on his property. Police station lawns make good base setups.
How reliable are your networks?
In New York our's is amazing as long as you can get cell phone service. With our Leica GS15 we often get results under 2-4 hundredths horizontally after checking with the TS. We use our system every day.
Tom
S. Carolina
South Carolina has a very reliable network RTK provided by the SC geodetic survey. The service cost is minimal compared to private networks.
We are located in an area commonly referred to in this part of the world as the "tri-state area". It in on the Ohio River where the boundaries of Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia come together. Each state has a state-wide RTN that can be accessed free of charge. They are very reliable. We use one or more everyday.
We also have access to several other networks in different states depending on where our work takes us.
Here in Belgium we have 3 rtk systems. 1 for the flemish part, one for the french part and one for brussels. What's great about them is that these services are totaly free of charge (except data connection).
Because it's so densely populated over here we have almost everywhere cell-coverage. I think 99% of the time the people over here only use a rover setup.
I have to say I was very happy yesterday with the performance I got from the WSRN. Considering I only signed up that morning and had never used the assembled equipment prior to then either, things when very well.
We just purchased our first RTK setup, a used Trimble R8. I am using a TSC2 cabled to the R8 with my Verizon Motorola Droid 3 cell using PdaNet and FoxFi to Bluetooth the network corrections to the antenna.
I was very afraid of getting the comms situation figured out. We use SurvCE as our controller software and thankfully Carlson has a bunch of cheat sheets for getting things configured correctly. It all worked on the first try, though I had to do a little picking and choosing between the various cheat sheets. It also helps that I have some experience using the Mobile Mapper and SurvCE, so it was not all completely new.
I started with one single-pole station and midway switched to another, just to see if it made a difference (it didn't seem to). I was not doing anything that required a lot of high accuracy and had closed, NAD-83/NAVD-88 coordinate control points to check into and localize with and was very happy with the results.
I still have a bit of a learning curve and questions about various configurations and settings, but for a first run, I don't think it could have gone much better!
And I must say that gschrock deserves a big "Thank you" for WSRN.
Since subscribing, I would say it has saved our company a lot of $$$ each year.