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West Tennessee | Tom, this has been a long road, but your question is a fair one. When I first got the combine the previous owner said that it would need a new "card" to work at a cost of something like $800. I thought, "yeah right". I fiddled with it some the first year (broke my leg so I wasn't in the cab much). The yield readings were all over the place and no good. Tried everything, cleaning sensor, downloading updates, JD tech out on service call etc the next year. No real money spent but no results either. Last year I took the mass flow sensor out and really cleaned it good and flexed it some. When I put it back in and calibrated the first time it seemed to be right on the money ( had to realize that right on the money was =/-5%). One thing I hate about these yield monitors is that if you have a problem you'll only know it right when you need to be running. It was very hard (I wouldn't do it) to shut down my harvest to trace issues with this thing. In order to make the maps we'd have to be more diligent about making sure we had fields entered correctly etc. My hired hand is not exactly well versed on all this and I'm not out in the field every minute with them so that can be a problem. For instance I had taught him how to change field numbers but one day last fall I got in the cab and he'd managed to zero all the data. Not a huge deal but....
As of the last few fields we cut last fall the monitor is back to it's old ways of being way off on the yields. I'm sure it needed cleaning or something, but with the terrible yields we were having, honestly I just didn't worry about it. Sometimes it seems like the yield monitor is just something else to worry with for me. Maybe that's just because I've had lots of problems. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the wedge box doesn't like any of my cards so there's no way to save any data to them. I think I read somewhere that I have to set them up in JD office. I'll have to dig out my copy of that and see if I can do something about that. Ahhh, more hours spent. Sorry, I know this was more than you wanted to know. Still thinking about the gps sensor and maybe we'll do it this year. | |
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John Deere yield monitor ????
