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Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

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Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#21
post #17
post #16

It is worth mentioning that you can set up your own RTK installation buy grabbing 2 higher-end GNSS receivers¹, installing one of them in a fixed location with reasonable sky view, and measuring it in for a week or two. You can then feed correction data from that to your 2nd receiver. Search for RTKlib. (Some GNSS receivers even have built-in source & sink handling.) Also, the GNSS software in most phones is sadly un…

Is that true even for the relatively new Android "raw GNSS" API? https://developer.android.com/develop/sensors-and-location/s... I believe Google are using that themselves for their "urban canyon" GPS improvements: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/12/improving-...

The API would provide pseudoranges and also the carrier phase on some phones, so it should be possible to calculate a solution with corrections.

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#22
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use The pricing norms for RTK correction networks were set 20 years ago, when operating your own base station meant buying a second $20,000 dual frequency receiver, and taking an extra guy any time you go out to do a survey, whose job is just to guard the base station. This made a $2000 a year network correction service seem like great valu…

The swiss solution does come with per hour pricing but it's still 0.50 CHF / minute. Which is still very expensive for hobbyists. I feel like the marginal costs for users is so low that it would be better if it were handled as a common good like GNSS systems themselves.

That is insane. My mower runs for ~100 minutes per day. This means 50CHF per day which as I see is around 50 euros. Home made base station cost with unicore gnss is around 220 euros…

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be another crowdsourced sensor fabric network, like air quality sensors, AIS, ADS-B, distributed SDR, etc.

http://rtk2go.com/

We've got a ublox ZED-F9P feeding into that. Station name JasonWiebeDairy. We set it up for RTK for AgOpenGPS - a FOSS auto-steer/mapping/control for agriculture.

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#24
post #11

I believe the various networks that supplement GPS/GNSS systems are called SBAS (the USA has WAAS for aircraft) and the fantastic opensource GPSTest app will show you what your device supports https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest

The SB in SBAS stands for satellite based. RTK is ground station based.

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#25

Andreas Spiess, the youtuber with a swiss accent, recently did a video on GNSS w/ RTK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc1LBFDj2MA Goes into detail about how to setup your own, join existing networks, even using fairly inexpensive tooling for your own RTK adventures.

I love his channel, and not only because of the accent. True no nonsense stuff. His videos about LoRa are brilliant.

I am especially gratefy for his video about power measurements of microcontrollers. It's really common sense for everyone with a little bit of electronics background but I've seen so many people (some who should have known better) just sticking a multimeter onto it and calling it a day that someone really explaining patiently and in simple terms, why this often does not really work is a godsend.

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#26

I just learned that Switzerland has a nationwide RTK network for cm level positional accuracy using GPS, Galileo, GALILEO, and/or Beidou, GNSS systems. And they have a nice map of all the station locations[0]. It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use, but it seems to be rather new. It would be interesting to see what possibilities a totally free nationwide RTK system would open…

I'm not totally sure why, but it was free for nonprofit research (university) use until 1-2 years ago. Now it's still cheaper than for the rest of the users, but still very expensive also for researchers.

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#27
post #17
post #16

It is worth mentioning that you can set up your own RTK installation buy grabbing 2 higher-end GNSS receivers¹, installing one of them in a fixed location with reasonable sky view, and measuring it in for a week or two. You can then feed correction data from that to your 2nd receiver. Search for RTKlib. (Some GNSS receivers even have built-in source & sink handling.) Also, the GNSS software in most phones is sadly un…

Is that true even for the relatively new Android "raw GNSS" API? https://developer.android.com/develop/sensors-and-location/s... I believe Google are using that themselves for their "urban canyon" GPS improvements: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/12/improving-...

Does this api improve on GPS drift?

Or is it up to the engineer to decide how to best to use these improvements?

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The swiss solution does come with per hour pricing but it's still 0.50 CHF / minute. Which is still very expensive for hobbyists. I feel like the marginal costs for users is so low that it would be better if it were handled as a common good like GNSS systems themselves.

That is insane. My mower runs for ~100 minutes per day. This means 50CHF per day which as I see is around 50 euros. Home made base station cost with unicore gnss is around 220 euros…

The traditional use case was for surveyors to use it. In that regard it's pretty cheap.

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#29

I just learned that Switzerland has a nationwide RTK network for cm level positional accuracy using GPS, Galileo, GALILEO, and/or Beidou, GNSS systems. And they have a nice map of all the station locations[0]. It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use, but it seems to be rather new. It would be interesting to see what possibilities a totally free nationwide RTK system would open…

In Portugal there are 2 already, one free and one paid. The free one was implemented almost 20 years ago. It amazes me that a country like Switzlerland only now implemented such a service, and quite expensive, nonetheless.

It's been running since 2016 at least in Switzerland, I was using it back then. And well, nothing is cheap in Switzerland. :)

Re: Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter accurate location

#30
It's always nice to see that RTK for-the-people is edging ever closer.

DIY kits from the likes of (no endorsement or vouching-for implied!) SparkFun and Ardusimple prove that the actual cost of basic entry to the tech is already under $2K, and probably under $1K.

It is a valuable ability for the average person to have available, because - whether we're talking about space, or time - everything benefits from accurate measurement.

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