From personal experience on a farm, I know that WAAS (free US based correction) will give “sub-meter” accuracy. I am not sure if that is a moving number or if it will average to sub meter. I know that there are better systems. On our farm we use an RTK system with our local base station. John Deere marketing quotes that we have sub inch accuracy. It is possible to do automated guidance of a tractor with WAAS corrections but personally the accuracy is not good enough.

From the picture it looks like they are using a Trimble receiver. Trimble is also a big company in tractor guidance so they would have the capability for sub inch accuracy. Without actually talking to the farmer there is no way to judge accuracy.

That is, I should actually move to USA to experience that 1-meter accuracy :) But here, after the receiver is fastened on a similar homemade mast, I usually still see position drift of a few meters.

By “Bluetooth” I mean typical bare receivers that cost about $100. These are *not navigators*: no maps, no screen, only raw position output (the latter is completely enough for me and I don’t see any reason to pay for things that will be rarely used). Bluetooth is very relevant here because it’s their de facto standard for data transfer. Even worse, nowadays lots of these receivers have *only* BT, and no wired output whatsoever.

Surprisingly or not, SiRF III chipset (very common in these receivers) is also used in Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx. Which, I believe, you would call a “quality” one – right? Which one do you have, by the way?

I believe that hacking in its truest sense is about the triumph of achievement, not the pain required to achieve it.

Case in point: I took an embedded systems design class where we started with an 8051 chip, and added a power & reset circuit, an oscillator, an external latch, external memory, a MAX232 chip for serial communication, and wrote our own c library to bit-bang LCD communication.

I learned two important things in that class:
1. Building things yourself is very cool, and gives you a great sense of accomplishment.
2. If you want something done in less than 200 hours, just spend the $40 and get a microcontroller that already has all the functionality that you want!

I mean no disrespect, but please let people hack in the manner that suits them best.

Basically you’ve just said in not so many words, that you can’t hack. You require Fisherprice tools to enable you to “hack”. I am sick and tired of assholes like you who think Hacking is just a trendy thing to do.

I’m sick and tired of you assholes who’ve dumbed down and ruined what at one point took a long point to achieve excellence.

@David Sutherland – you pay me more than $30 an hour, and i’ll walk the paths to paint your wildflower billboards!

I’d love to have it hacked with a wildflower seed hopper.

Been wanting to do this for a long time…

paint a huge field with a corporate logo using vivid wildflowers near an airport… any takers out there? I’ll work on leasing fields and selling ads if you can design the gear.