“Centimetres Everywhere for Everyone” - The evolution of Trimble GNSS Technology
Trimble has a rich history in the invention and improvement in GPS and GNSS solutions. As one of the first companies to commercialise the emerging military focused technology in the 1980s, Trimble has always concentrated on simplifying the use of GPS/GNSS systems and worked to broaden the technology’s reach.
It was during the 1990s, as the technology’s importance to civilian life was recognised, that GPS technology and applications became widespread. The growth of many of these applications was enabled by the invention and application of Real Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS that, by using a local base station, allowed users to achieve 2.5cm accuracies in horizontal positioning while moving.
As GPS technology rose in population during the late 1990s, Trimble developed a vision statement announcing their commitment to providing “Centimetres Everywhere for Everyone”, making centimetre level GNSS a utility available to everyone, everywhere in the world.
Since then, Trimble has continued to pursue this goal of delivering centimetre level accuracy. In 2011, Trimble introduced CenterPoint RTX, a satellite delivered centimetre level positioning service. And while this technology negated the need of a local base station, the system took up to 20 minutes to initialise — a far cry from RTK’s instant initialisation time.
To combat this, earlier this month, Trimble announced the release of its new ProPoint™ positioning engine for their NAV-900TM controller for machine guidance. Now, by combining the ProPoint software with the Trimble CenterPoint RTX correction service, farmers can achieve the 2.5-centimetre performance of RTK and ease of use of CenterPoint RTX in less than five minutes — an improvement in convergence time of up to 75 percent.
The faster convergence is made possible by the inclusion of the BeiDou-III constellation, which increases the overall satellites used by 25 percent. These additional satellites, combined with Trimble's newly released ProPoint technology on the NAV-900 GNSS guidance controller and the CenterPoint RTX service, deliver up to 40 percent greater positioning availability in challenging environments, including along tree lines and gullies.
This helps farmers get up and running faster and continue operating even in tough environments, especially during critical field operations, such as planting, harvesting, and spraying, when precision and time is of the essence.
Vantage is already seeing great results for our customers using ProPoint and CenterPoint RTX, including high accuracy positioning even in difficult environments.
With this year’s summer harvest, Vantage is offering discounts on CenterPoint RTX correction services from Trimble, so you can benefit from precision agriculture solutions at a discounted price*. Take adVantage of our Summer Harvest deals here.
To learn more about this update and Trimble GNSS correction solutions, contact your local Vantage team on 1300 Trimble.
*Offer ends December 31st, 2021.
