The Base Station

Why does anyone write anything when it’s already all been written and is so readily available on the internet? It provides me with no incentive to write something original when it has already been said so much better than I ever could. But I learn best by writing and that is my goal so I guess I will try.

To not quite quote an article I was reading, a base station is a receiver, placed at a fixed location, that monitors the GPS satellites . The base station corrects errors in the system and relays them to the tractor (rover receiver) through a radio link, the internet connected to a cell phone, then to the tractor through blue tooth.

But back to the base station. It is an antenna connected to a computer, or Raspberry Pi, that collects the satellite data. It provides a fixed location to correct the lack of uniformity in the satellite signal that the tractor receives, due to atmospheric conditions. Without it you get the low accuracy of four inches or greater. I know, I’m repeating myself.  The base is an NTRIP server. NTRIP means network transport of RTCM data over IP, what that means I don’t know. But the NTRIP server sends its info back to the NTRIP caster. Which is actually a server.

Confused yet?

A server, when not involved in all this stuff is a computer that hosts things like blogs and web pages and probably a lot of other things I am not looking that up too. But for this purpose the base is called the server and it sends its info back to a real server which for this job is called an NTRIP castor. Because it casts the info out to the tractor. Or not, but still called a caster.

One caster can have many different base stations hooked up to it. Each base station can cover approximately twenty miles, one millimeter per kilometer from the base, whatever the equivalent of that would be in miles.

So the base station (NTRIP server) connects to the server (NTRIP caster) which connects to the phone in the tractor (NTRIP client) to tell it how to steer the tractor.  Easy cheesy!

Until next time another great video by lance!