Often we get questions regarding using SNIP for “just one caster in my home-office-barn-garage” applications. And that is precisely why we created the free Lite model of SNIP to serve just that need. The Lite model provides a means to use your old PC *1 and whatever GNSS unit you wish to use, to create a Base Station you can put in the back room and forget about.
Several different configurations are possible. You can run SNIP as your own NTRIP Caster, with such a local devices connected (as a serial port and an NTRIP Server), or you can PUSH-Out the data to another remote Caster as be being done here. [In fact you can do both of these in the same device] Your NTRIP Clients can then connect to any at these points as you allow.
Here is node with a simple uBlox device connected with a serial port. It is part of a local network of low cost devices we operate. It does however have a good roof mounted antenna as described here. As the SNIP screen image below shows, this node had been running for just under 16 full days when the image was captured. The last disconnection-reconnection event (of which there had been 102) occurred one day and 18 hours and 59 minutes before. This resulted in an overall connection up-time of 99.7% for this stream. It has served out about 480MB of raw data.
You can also see in the console log that this SNIP Caster has created a PUSH-out connection to our RTK2go.com portal and is sending the local data there. You can connect SNIP‘s PUSH-out data to any other caster that will accept it.
Doing so here serves two purposes. First, because the RTK2go.com node lives on a public static IP with a registered domain name, it is easy for other parties to resolve the domain name and get to the data. Second, this data is being logged for use in an RTK research project and frankly it is easier to collect the final log data in one place and allow SNIP‘s FTP data logging services to archive it for us.
Notes
*1 We are even informed that some folks are using old Windows XP nodes for this. Officially, SNIP is recommend for use with Windows 7 or newer.
*2 Which is why it often very problematic to run a 24-7 server or data feed from a home. Local IPS (in this case Time-Warner Cable) have no idea how to operate their own networks and quite often there are significant network disruptions for short periods of under a minute if not longer.
Update (processing results)
A user had asked to see the results of this RTK filter using a uBlox6T unit. So here it is in an article from using common RTKLIB tools. Please note the scale in the lower right corner. This is more or less typical on what you can expect to see with very good antenna placement between two static sites of under ~10km. The first of these shows the L1-only device with corrections provided from a high grade L1/L2 survey device. The second set of plots uses another L1-only uBlox6T device that is co-located with the high grade L1/L2 survey device as the base station. In neither of these plot sets is the ability of the L1/L2 ionosphere measurement pair used. The L1-only uBlox6T used as a base station looks deceivingly good under such ideal conditions.
