[HN Gopher] Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for c...
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Swipos-GIS/GEO, nationwide GNSS RTK correction for centimeter
accurate location
Author : RedlineTriad
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-05-10 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.swisstopo.admin.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.swisstopo.admin.ch)
| RedlineTriad wrote:
| 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 up.
|
| Swisstopo is a government organization that already provides many
| services like highly accurate maps for free.
|
| [0] https://shop.swipos.ch/Map/SensorMap.aspx
| friendly_capy wrote:
| 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.
| Leherenn wrote:
| It's been running since 2016 at least in Switzerland, I was
| using it back then. And well, nothing is cheap in
| Switzerland. :)
| ftth_finland wrote:
| Finland has a free nationwide RTK network. It's nominally only
| for testing and R&D use, tho, and you have to renew your
| account every three months.
|
| https://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/en/finpos/rtk
|
| However, you can easily setup your own RTK base station for a
| few hundred bucks. Very convenient to use the free service to
| determine the static coordinates of your base station.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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 value for money!
|
| Some networks offer more affordable options these days - such
| as weekly and hourly licenses for drone pilots.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This should be another crowdsourced sensor fabric network,
| like air quality sensors, AIS, ADS-B, distributed SDR, etc.
| barnabee wrote:
| https://www.onocoy.com/ seems to be doing just that.
|
| I have no affiliation, and no strong opinion on their
| specific approach, but I do find it interesting and have
| thought about running a node, especially since enjoying
| fiddling around with LoRa / Meshtastic.
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| http://rtk2go.com/
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| 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.
| RedlineTriad wrote:
| 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.
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| 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...
| Leherenn wrote:
| The traditional use case was for surveyors to use it. In
| that regard it's pretty cheap.
| stereo wrote:
| Luxembourg's RTK system is completely free to use:
| https://act.public.lu/fr/gps-reseaux/spslux1.html
| ale42 wrote:
| 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.
| auspiv wrote:
| Many US states also have their own (free) CORS networks,
| primarily from transportation departments. NOAA helps keep track
| of them all. Not many of these are realtime unfortunately.
|
| https://geodesy.noaa.gov/CORS/
|
| US overview:
|
| https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=19038...
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Real-Time Kinematic - Differential GNSS updates broadcasted by
| radio or other means that aid accuracy while moving. It was a
| Trimble (GPS) marketing term around 2000 just prior to SA that
| was able to defeat it and offer 10mm horizontal error and 1m
| vertical error.
|
| Disclaimer: I worked on firmware on RTK radio gear.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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
| eqvinox wrote:
| You're confusing 2 different things here. SBAS gets you
| (roughly) from 5m to 1m, to meet requirements for aviation use.
| RTK gets you from 5m to <0.1m. Both use base stations to
| monitor deviations, but for RTK the base station is intended to
| be <100km from you and the data needs to have as little delay
| as possible. SBAS base stations are a few per continent & don't
| care about delay to the same degree.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| The SB in SBAS stands for satellite based. RTK is ground
| station based.
| muyfine wrote:
| There was a survey of available GNSS corrections services from a
| couple of years ago - some of these services are global and not
| limited to a single country:
|
| https://medium.com/@mikehorton/what-is-a-mass-market-gnss-co...
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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 unable to accept
| the correction data from any of these systems, regardless of
| whether it's a nationwide network or your personal setup. This is
| purely a software limitation on the vendor GNSS stack, but sadly
| there is not enough demand for this. (An app will not fix this,
| we're talking vendor specific low level system code here.)
|
| [1] e.g. u-blox T/R series, but check specific descriptions about
| raw output/RTK capabilities, it changes between generations. You
| also want recent ones with RTCMv3, not RTCMv2.x.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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-...
| wibr wrote:
| The API would provide pseudoranges and also the carrier phase
| on some phones, so it should be possible to calculate a
| solution with corrections.
| aantix wrote:
| Does this api improve on GPS drift?
|
| Or is it up to the engineer to decide how to best to use
| these improvements?
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| 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.
| chpwssn wrote:
| Sparkfun also has an interesting writeup on how you could set
| up a base station and feed into networks as well
| https://docs.sparkfun.com/SparkFun_RTK_Firmware/permanent_ba...
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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.
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