I have collected thousands of acres with GPS and laser since around 96 and in more recent years with RTK only.  I have found the designs for laser control, from RTK data sets, are working out very well.  I have also installed and been around different company combinations of RTK machine control setups mainly pertaining to point to point drainage issues. 

I would be interested in comments from people about "complete field" design projects done where every inch of the field is addressed like say with conventional laser systems BUT with RTK?  To put it another way complete projects take days even weeks vs hours to collect the data.  So how big of an issue, percieved or real, is it for people's "mission planning" to utilize RTK on a 24/7 basis and still maintain accuracy.  The premiss being laser will give you 24/7 not counting fog.  I think the A&L acres presentation alluded to that for the next step.  I am thinking the new GPS systems that will utilize the new GPS birds going up in coming years will make this a mute point what with little down time due to constellaton accuracy issues etc.  Again with RTK it appears to me that in the vertical this is all the more critical than in the horizontal and if that is addressed we will have the best of both worlds given the fact that ag usually has a very short opportunity window to complete projects.

Any thoughts on these issues?

Thanks,

Arnie