RTK-Autosteer

RTK – all about being precise January 4, 2010

Satellite navigation is being used increasingly across the world in all sorts of clever ways, not least amongst them being for agriculture. Here we are seeing the enormous benefits of being extremely precise, making sure we have the least amount of overlap between one pass across the field and the next. This cuts down on waste – wasted time, fuel and chemicals and the amount of wear on machines. It also means that we do less damage to crops through double dosing with chemicals. So, this technology is good for the pocket and good for the environment.

Another clever way we are using it in agriculture is to autosteer machines so that they run in the same place year in year out. This means that they don’t damage the whole of the field or paddock but are confined to perhaps as little as 20% of the area. Presently, machines run over, and therefore damage nearly 100% of our fields every season. And, when there can be 12 t on each wheel, this is a lot of damage and soils don’t bounce back overnight, they can take many years to recover. To keep machines in exactly the same place each year, we need to use a very particular satellite guidance technology called RTK (Real Time Kinematic). Given the right technology and the right set up, this can steer vehicles to ± 2 cm accuracy – an incredible achievement that even the best drivers can’t achieve, even for a few minutes.

There is a lot to learn about this technology and the idea of this blog is to share experiences and for people who are having problems to post them on the site in the hope that others can help solve them. There are now many providers of this technology, so I hope they will take part and guide people through the maze that sometimes confronts them.

One way of finding out more is to come to one of our workshops. The next is taking place on 9th February 2010 in the UK and you can find out more by visiting: http://www.controlledtrafficfarming.com/content/workshops.aspx

So, have you tried RTK and has it worked seamlessly for you? If not, tell us what is going wrong or how you solved the problem.