What is new in the SNIP 1_6_0 release  [released March 29th 2017]

This is the next release of SNIP following the Rev 1_5_0 release of last month (March 3rd) with major new functionality added to support older pre-NTRIP GNSS Base stations.  Provisions have now been added to allow managing direct TCP/IP connections from such devices to the SNIP Caster.  This feature may also be of value if your GNSS vendor only provides NTRIP Server functionality as an additional paid option on your device.  A new tab called RAW TCP/IP has been added to manage these connection types. The previous PUSH-In and PUSH-Out tabs are still used for federating networks of GNSS Base stations which do speak the NTRIP protocol.

This release is recommended for all users and is now the primary download. At this writing, SNIP is now being used in over one hundred countries to operate NTRIP Caster networks.

The primary improvements made from the prior release are as follows:

• All paid editions of SNIP now support multiple RAW TCP/IP streams from remote Base Stations. There is no limit imposed on the number of RAW TCP/IP streams SNIP can run (other than the overall license limit). This feature can be used during the evaluation process but is not available in the Lite edition of SNIP.

• The RAW TCP/IP streams all reside in a new tab.  This type of stream is created up by way of a new dialog where a specific IP value and port to be used when connecting to your SNIP Caster are entered.  As a RAW TCP/IP stream does not provide the traditional Caster Table entry, the Caster Table dialog may used to enter this data.  And of course SNIP‘s unique auto-set functions can parse over the RTCM data streams and set the Caster Table values for you.  As with other data streams, these features may be set up for each slot and are remembered each time SNIP runs thereafter.

• The way in which SNIP‘s in-line registration process works was revised to first contact our license servers to get a secure “test” page downloaded before the formal registration process began.  Some additional error messages at the lower layer are now also reported if a connection failure occurs.  This change was made to address connectivity problems that some users have reported when registering the Lite edition of SNIP.  The most common registration issue encountered at this time is that a few Windows 10 users are unable to start secure socket web page from SNIP due to various firewalls. They parties have the register their SSL drivers directly as described here.  [SNIP uses industry standard SSL connections for registration, but some machines block connections from any application they do not recognize]

Other improvements were also added in this release of SNIP including:

• A long-running issue with European cellular re-connection events in some NTRIP Servers connecting to SNIP is now believed to be solved.  A few users have reported that the the same GNSS Base Station would lose connection for tens of seconds and then reconnect with its mountPt renamed XXX_02   (where _02 was SNIP auto-naming being invoked to avoid a duplicate). The root cause of this is believed be cellular dropouts combined with messages backing up on the sending TCP/IP link layer when the connection went down.  On rare occasions this has also been observed on wired connections as well.
• The DLL modules which perform the web page SSL functions in SNIP have been updated to the current release.
• Improvements were made to the GNSS network detection logic to support BeiDou, QZSS and Galileo types, and an error present in the last release was corrected in the Caster Table Entry dialog logic where an extra “+” was used whenever no GPS type was used.
• Further English usage and grammar issues have been corrected.

The SNIP development team is very grateful for the feedback our user community provides to us.  Your requests and suggestions drive our product development road map.  Keep sending them to us!  One of the primary features targeted for the next release of SNIP is further automating the product update process so your user and your server node are off-line only for a minute or two when you do routine upgrades.  Some users have already asked us to develop a similar “RAW” support using only UDP connections in rural areas where TCP/IP dropouts and backups can be failure prone.  And the awaited release of SNIP for Ubuntu users is nearly ready for Beta testing to begin.

Next up:  The 1.7.0 release will also support Ubuntu GUI users and will be released only in the BETA channel for early user testing.

The Prior Release

The Next Release

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SNIP is an NTRIP Caster.  If you are seeking for an NTRIP Client,
try one of the products mentioned here or here.

You can always obtain the most current release of SNIP here.