The need to monitor the data quality in one or more of your Caster streams is a common one.  The information presented on the tabs provides an easy color coded way to quickly view the stream’s status.  Color is used to draw the operator’s attention to streams that are not 100% operational.  Once a SNIP installation is set up, this often serves as the primary feedback which an operator needs.  On start-up, SNIP quickly builds up the requested set of slots from the saved settings, and the required network is typically on-line  (“gone green”) in under 15 seconds.   Still, additional monitoring abilities are often desired.  SNIP provides three general solutions to this need.

Message Monitoring

When the detailed content of one or more specific messages must be examined, SNIP provides a basic RTCM3 message decoder in a dialog for viewing the message details from multiple streams at once.  The menu item is called “Show in RTCM Viewer.”  This detailed decoding requires that the message stream be parsed for its RTCM3 content. Collapsible arrows expand to show each message element.

Another option, “Show Message Types,” provides a more basic insight into the different types of messages that are present.  This second ability is of great value when multiple types of data are present in the same stream, or when sending proprietary data such as uBlox message content.   The typical use case here is to detect and remove such data (by correctly setting up the NTRIP Server data source) to ensure that extraneous data is not sent to the NTRIP Clients. Both of these commands are available under the right-click pop-up menu for each slot.

Monitoring RTCM3 with the Decoder Dialog is described here.

Using the universal decoder to show message type is described here.

Graphical Monitoring

There is also a common need to use the data streams to provide a basic navigation filter in order to provide visual feedback regarding the stream data.   Often advanced users will use 3rd party tools to monitor specific details of the data signals, simply connecting to their own streams like any other NTRIP client.  SNIP provides some basic navigation filters and plotting tools to enable this ability under the “Monitor” menu item.  You can, as an example, use the observations from one stream, and the corrections from another, while using the ephemeris from a third, to perform the normal RTK solutions on your streams.

This tool provides a visual insight into the real time performance of the selected data streams.  The Graical View command is available under the right-click pop-up menu for each slot.

Graphical Monitoring is described in greater detail here.

Current Connections Report

Each of the data stream tabs also provides a button labeled “List MountPts” on the lower right hand side which can be used to display a terse summary of all active mountPts, highlighting any with issues in a red and indicating for how long the condition has persisted.  A typical report is shown at right.

The Current Connections Report is further described in greater detail here.