Your own RTK base station
A second receiver bolted to a post, sending corrections to your tractor forever, so the inch you steer by belongs to nobody but you.
What it is
A GNSS board on a fixed, known point — a post, a roof peak, anything that will not move for years. It sits still, works out exactly how wrong the satellites are at this instant, and streams that correction to the receiver on the tractor, which applies it and collapses its own error from feet to an inch.
The numbers
- About $300 once: a second receiver board (~$200–240) and an antenna (~$60). There is no yearly anything.
- Correction quality holds to roughly 1 cm plus 1 part per million of baseline — about an inch at the base, degrading gently with distance. Inside 10 km you will not notice it.
- Against a dealer subscription at $600 a year, it has paid for itself in the seventh month and never asks again.
Why it's here
A subscription is a switch somebody else owns. This is the cheapest point in the whole guide at which you stop being a subscriber to the ground under your own feet.
The catch
It must not move. Bolt it to something permanent; if the post shifts, every row you plant afterwards shifts with it, silently. It needs a path to the tractor — either internet at both ends (the usual answer) or a radio link. And the survey-in that establishes exactly where the base is takes hours of sitting still to settle; rushing it bakes a constant offset into everything you do forever, and the field will look perfect while being in the wrong place.
In the guide
Chapter 4 of the Autofarmation guide. Autofarmation →