Boyden, Iowa Sioux County | My decision to go with Trimble over other brands.
1. There were only two brands that had implement steering available at the time of my purchase.
2. My local Trimble dealer has a lot of experience and uses the AutoPilot and RTK. I had also done business with him in the past with yield monitors. My questions (I had a lot of them) were answered in a timely manner when I was making my purchase decision.
3. I value the fact that I have terrain compensation mounted on the implement, that might not be as important with a close coupled mounted planter, but if I was to go to a drawn planter it would be the best way to account for differing slopes for the tractor and implement.
4. From what I could determine at the time of purchase Trimble's RTK radios are top of the line. I would have to say that the groves and a couple of hills have not been a problem, I have not lost the RTK fix in my operation even when the repeater was out of sight.
Can I move it around for other uses? Yes I intend to use it on my mounted strip till rig. I have not decided how much of the tracker I will move and/or what I will engineer for the strip till rig. I will definitely move the 252 receiver and Nav II controller which is just a matter of a couple of bolts. It will mean recalibrating each time it is moved but I would consider this something that I would do each season anyway.
The learning curve was ok not much different than learning any new piece of software, the more you use it the easier it got. With the Trimble Field Manager Display it is easy to enter in data with the touch screen's keyboard. I had never used a lightbar or guidance system before so it was all new to me. After reading the manuals I had no problem with entering in AB lines. Making the curve AB lines took some planning but I would expect that with any contoured field. |
Implement Steering PICs
