Increase position accuracy somehow - currently only using GPS

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi! I am building a spot lock function for my trolling motor. For getting location I am using a neo-6m gps module with neogps library and it works ok but I would like to get a bit more accuracy (currently looking at about 3-5m while on the water). Is there some approach to increase accuracy at least a little bit that does not require hardware for thousands of dollars?

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No.

3

Hi,
Look at this YouTube from Sparkfun, they have what you are looking for, down to 1cm position.

Tom.... :slight_smile:

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4

TomGeorge:
Hi,
Look at this YouTube from Sparkfun, they have what you are looking for, down to 1cm position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=328&v=_a1ixhYJe60&feature=emb_logo

Tom.... :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your answer! So these systems use RTK and from what I can gather the Swedish DGNSS system provides accuracy of about 1m (assuming one is somewhat near a station). This sounds a lot better than the 3-5m I am currently getting. Do you know anyone who has actually implemented rtk with arduino? I would love to see some examples before buying hardware for 200 dollar :slight_smile:

5

The U-Blox C94-M8P kit has both a base station and a "rover" with a radio link. It allows you to achieve 1-2 cm accuracy, for US $399. It works out of the box, but some study is required to learn to set it up and use it properly.

I've been using it for a while and it has some important limitations:

(1) the base station can take quite a while (24-48 h) to accurately determine its own position, or you can enter a known position. The absolute accuracy of the rover position depends almost entirely on the accuracy of the base station position.

(2) the rover can take up to 20 minutes to solve the initial carrier phase problem, to determine its position relative to the base. The rover acts just like every other GPS module (it IS a GPS module), and can send its position via the usual NMEA sentence to an Arduino.

A very cool feature of the radio link is that the rover can automatically send its position back to the base for logging by a computer.

Extensive review and performance check here UBlox C94-M8P RTK GPS review and performance evaluation – Maurice's Musings

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