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Leesburg, Ohio | I would definately recommend the integrated valve kit. We put one on an 8420 this spring with GS2 and absolutely love it. We have had (and still have) two other brands of auto steer equipment, and this is by far the best of anything we have tried in four years of experience.
We also put an ATU (steering wheel kit) on the 8300 at the same time, and absolutely hate it. Just changed the 8300 to an integrated kit, and it works great now, just like the 8420.
The integrated kit will allow you to make a half turn at the end of the field, hit the resume button, and it will finish the turn for you, aquire the correct line, all very smoothly and accurately.
The ATU was just as accurate across the field, but absolutely would NOT aquire the line until about 50 to 100 YARDS into the field. If we punched the resume button before that, it would immediately and sharply JERK us off line exactly three feet EVERY TIME. Neither we, Stellar support, our dealer, nor the Deere territory rep, nor Deere factory engineers could fix it. Apparently not an unusual occurance for some ATU's. Our dealer ended up refunding our money for the ATU, and installing an integrated kit (pretty much at cost) to fix it. Works great now.
Accuracy depends more on the signal type than equpment, in general. You will get more drift with WASS and SF1. SF2 will have less drift, but still not very repeatable. RTK can be sub-inch all day and all year. As i said above, the deere ATU can be just as accurate as the integrated valve, but it will not aquire the line very well at all (you will have to find the line manually with markers, row count, watch the screen or whatever) and it will not track curves very well at all. The integrated system will do it all. | |
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Which way to go.
