Ideas/ sources for “foot “accurate outdoor navigation, mapping GPS hacks, beacons...?

vanmunch

Hey Everyone,

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with “foot “accurate outdoor navigation systems? Even being accurate to 5 feet in a football size field would be good enough. Has anyone worked with mapping or survey quality GPS systems that can be read by a microcontroller (propeller)? Any suggestions? IR beacons, multiple “normal” GPS, hacked smartphones?

Dave

Hal Albach

From the Garmin site, GPS accuracy with a receiver alone is good to about 15 meters. Augmenting with WAAS gets it down to about 5 meters, add differential and the best you can get will be 3 - 5 meters. From what I understand about differential is that a local transmitter will help offset the error, like at airports. I get the feeling that realizing your goal of 5 feet will be very hard to acheive.

Hal

vanmunch

Hey Thanks! Precision Ag has been achieving sub inch accuracy with year over year repeatability for ~5 years or so, but that’s more accuracy and cost than what I’m looking for (those systems use GPS+RTK). One possibility is the 1500 GPS from Ag Leader that uses WAAS for correction. It’s a combination antenna/receiver system. I’ve attached the manual below and there’s more info here: http://www.agleader.com/products/gps/

Can someone take a look at the manual and help me to understand if this is something that the Propeller could interface with?

Update: I see it uses RS-232C so I'm guessing that its a yes?

max72

I think DGPS could be a little bit out of price range..
Consider also that the cm error could be lost for short periods even in the open field. If you are in an area with trees, for instance, you'll have problems getting a fixing and the error will be much higher nonetheless.

Massimo