With Waas you should stay within a foot all the time, odd time you might be out 2' but that should be a rare event. what brand of system are you running?

 

I have a trimble 500 with ezsteer. Before I had a ezguide plus with ezsteer. I am usually within about 6" with was fine but I was wanting to seed between rows on 12" spacing if possible. I've been hearing that the accuracy this year on omnistar is not as good as claimed. Maybe there is no truth to this??

 

I have a trimble 500 with ezsteer. Before I had a ezguide plus with ezsteer. I am usually within about 6" with was fine but I was wanting to seed between rows on 12" spacing if possible. I've been hearing that the accuracy this year on omnistar is not as good as claimed. Maybe there is no truth to this??

I am wanting to do the same thing as you ...seed between the rows. I didn't realize you could do a two day trial with omnistar. maybe a guy should be doing that first.

 

I had omnistar for 1 year on my case sprayer. Last year I used waas and was happy with it's accuracy and will not switch to omnistar anytime soon. With slower speeds during planting you may notice an advantage with omnistar though. I have the integrated Deere auotrac with SF1 signal in my 4wd and I'm always playing with that nudge button during seeding.

 

NO
have topcon system and omnistar, never fails with on free signal but omnistar always takes time to "seed" and if you lose signal it takes 20 minutes to "reseed" ive not resubscibed to omnistar but you give away a fraction of accuracy.
most times i have 15 to 19 sattelittes on free signal only problem is sattelite drift which didnt happen with omnistar

 

NO
have topcon system and omnistar, never fails with on free signal but omnistar always takes time to "seed" and if you lose signal it takes 20 minutes to "reseed" ive not resubscibed to omnistar but you give away a fraction of accuracy.
most times i have 15 to 19 sattelittes on free signal only problem is sattelite drift which didnt happen with omnistar

STO is that to steer you big tractor or spray tractor? How are you going with seeding?

Madsnake

 

solar flares have been screwing up a lot of things the last couple weeks.. we run omnistar HP and in eastern SD it has generally been good. this spring the accuracy has not been as good as Ive seen it, I think because of satellite availability/these solar flares. generally though, the HP signal is pretty reliable, and accurate enough for small grains at least.

We downgraded from RTK to omni this season for our corn just because we were tired of RTK constantly kicking out, so we figured the reliability was worth the decrease in accuracy. I would not, however trust it to steer a sprayer at 12mph or a sidedresser at 10mph right down the middle of the corn rows. I'm planting onto some striptill that was done with RTK, and I am constantly nudging the omnistar around to put me right on the strips. And thats with 30" rows, so I dont know whether you would like interseeding 12" rows. You might end up pulling your hair out.. It all depends on how fast you go and how well your tractor is tuned.

 

I have a TopCon system. AGI-3 reciever and x20 topcon screen. I tried the waas only signal last fall and the tractor kept wandering and losing the line. In a half mile you would have to nudge 8 - 10 feet. Was very unhappy with it. Tried the 3 day omnistar trial and it worked flawlessly. Then this spring tried the waas only signal and same problems with wandering and losing the line. Signed up with omnistar ($480 for 3 month package) and it works flawlessly again. Hasn't once missed a beat in about 50 hrs of use this spring. Starts up with-in 30 sec to 1 minute, never a problem. I would say I have 1-2" accuracy. In my opinion you must have the omnistar correction as it just doesn't work for me on the waas only signal. I'm am seeding cereals, pulses and canola with a airdrill with NH3 sectional control in East Central Alberta, Canada.

 

Thanks for the replies.
Cobra1970, where are you located? I am near Coronation. I am having the same results with waas here lately. Glad to hear that omni has worked good for you. I think from what you say I had better at least give omni a try.
I find it strange that waas worked so well for me for years and now it is so bad. Maybe I am just getting fussier as time goes by but I remember that my accuracy was far better a few years ago.

 

crw: I am located at Killam. We always use the JD GPS using the waas signal and isn't a problem but with the Topcon system we have to use the omnistar paid service to make it work. Really a small price to pay for frustration free operation.

 

short answer yes. Money well spend on a Trimble

 

Yes

 

waas is working good for me, but I'm not trying to seed between the rows.

 

We have always just used waas in the past and the accuracy has been "acceptable" but this spring for some reason it was terrible. Sometimes I would have to nudge 20-30 inches just to line up with the next pass and sometimes I had to nudge as much as 50-60 inches by the time I reached the end of the pass. Sounds like I'm not the only one with this issue. I activated Omnistar for the first time a few days ago and I haven't touched the nudge button once from pass to pass. The only time I have used the nudge is when making the second round in spiral mode. I used to run my overlap at about 8-10 inches on waas and now I have it set on 3.5 inches and it seems to be right on the money. So far anyway. For my situation Omnistar is well worth the money. I did an annual subscription as we move the receiver and nav controllers from the tractors to the combines at harvest.

If you're having trouble with waas I think you will be pleased with Omnistar.

 

Yes and going back to a unit on waas will result in elevated blood pressure and foul language.

 

Wow not one negative response. Guess I had better give it a try and see how it performs. Thanks everyone for you input. Colin

 

spraying at 23kmh on free signal no drams, and i have no drama with omnistar works bullet proff just the darn seeding that takes time or is something set up wrong with my topcon

 

What swath mode are you guys using? I've noticed that when I use the
heading mode(east-90degrees) it's always off 20 -30 inches. Now I'm
using the straight mode and making Mark A at one end of the field and
Mark B at the other end. It works perfect

I was told once, that the further apart you keep the A&B marks the more
accurate.
I'm not crazy about this AFS gps. I think my old Outback worked way
better on waas.

 

I always use a b settings. It never really seemed to make a difference to go east/west or north/south or anything in between. But there did seem to be good gps days and bad gps days. I also never use the same line twice and always make a new one. My memory on my 500 seems to fill up and needs to be dumped almost yearly but still have many hours left as a result. My nearest Case gps guy is now 100 miles away so I really wish there was so kind of direction or help manual for these systems. Things that need to be done once a year are really tough to figure out "what did I do last year".
Oh well, hope that this omnistar works for me this year or I will be on the phone quite a bit once the fields dry up. Colin

 

I pulled my hair out trying to plant with waas last year with the 500 and ez steer, my gap between the last pass was completely random and never consistant at all. Upgraded to xp and have never been happier, the difference between waas and the corrected signal is mind blowing. I say do it, if xp isn't good enough then hp should be and doesn't cost that much more

 

didn't matter this spring waas omni or rtk, everyone had trouble witht the trimble in our area, got fmx1000 rtk and phoned dealer told him to come fix the problem of the gps being out of line he told me it was a solar storm, Wasn't too happy after we switched to rtk to increase accurucy, everytime you go to a seminar that promotes rtk you hear them bashing waas on how its off all the time, well after spending a good chunck of money on rtk I expect it to be dead on and not dealing with flaws, dealer said every other system was having this trouble, phoned 2 friends with gs1 and they were fine, well so far for rtk

 

Who's correction source for your RTK?

Been running Trimble RTK for three years and it has been practically flawless running my own base station.

We have one field that is just out of my towers range and seeded it with WASS and what a joke! Wouldn't go back to that for no money.

 

I read this thread with a lot of interest but never really made a decision. After a week of pounding the nudge button on our Pro 600 I broke down and got an HP subscription. So far it has been an excellent investment, it has worked flawlessly and makes life so much easier. You can start a line on one side of the field then move to the other side and when you get back to where you started everything will line up perfectly. The only time you need to use the nudge button now is if you have a field border that isn't straight.

When you start up in the morning you don't need to play around to get the line right it's right where you left it the night before. I can start the tractor in the morning and by the time I grease and check openers the convergence is usually down to 2". As I'm writing this I have 1" accuracy, you can't even feel the tractor steering. No more overlapping, no more misses, other than operator error.

We are on 10" spacing and I'm hoping we'll be able to seed between the rows next year.

 

Case just came out with a receiver they had rtk accuracy for 1800 a yr and you'll be able to accuse foreign satellites so the flairs should affect you that much

 

I run ominstar on our seeding tractor, the HP/XP signal is great most of the time. Can set runs up using the AB line and they match up well. However occassionally the seeder appears to be 30 cm one way, If I tell the tractor the implement is offset by 30cm it works well again, but then it will be out again, so I switch back to no offset and it is fine. Cannot explain why this occurs.
Sometimes it takes 10-20minutes to get the DGPS signal which is a PITA, but not very often.
The HP/XP signal is hopeless in some of our paddocks where there are large trees, because it looses the signal and reverts to VBS as backup which is slightly less accurate, it then decides to go back to HP/XP and then the nudge button gets awork out. In these paddocks I just use the VBS signal now because it keeps my blood pressure lower.
Overall Omistar Hp/XP is great if you have no variables that stuff it up like big trees