Some days, Vince Denis sounds more like an air traffic controller than a farmer.
“I’m often tracking 10 satellites and three beacons all at the same time and never less than eight satellites,” the Domremy, Sask., producer says.
“I get three inch to six inch accuracy every day. And this is all with WAAS, the free signal. It’s phenomenal. Everyone’s been told that WAAS is only good for two or three feet or maybe one foot if you’re lucky.”
Denis knows that location is part of his advantage. He thinks the three stationary beacons he receives are probably from the airports at Saskatoon, Prince Albert, Sask., and Melfort, Sask. He is more or less in the middle of that triangle.
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“It gives us just about perfect triangulation from the ground towers. We’re very fortunate to be at this point.”
However, despite the old adage about location being everything, Denis said it’s only part of the deal.
“My neighbours all the way around me have all kinds of different GPS (global positioning system) and most of them are lucky to track four satellites.”
When asked if he thinks the performance is coming from the Zynx GPS or the Setter antenna, Denis doesn’t hesitate.
“It has to be the antenna. The only way you can draw in more satellites is with a better antenna, and that’s what’s giving me this three inch and six inch accuracy with a plain old WAAS signal. The weak antennas guys have around here cannot pull the ground beacons and they have trouble pulling enough satellites for guidance. Some of the guys have sent their units back because they can’t pull an adequate signal.”
However, there is a down side to having a high quality GPS antenna. The U.S. government doesn’t like it.
“They must have some way of knowing when I’m triangulating off a big pile of satellites,” he said.
“The antenna is pulling off more satellites than they like, so they shut me down right in the field, as I’m spraying. A message flashes across my screen and there’s a lot of encrypted codes, then the screen tells me I’m about to perform an illegal act and that if I proceed, they’re going to do something, I don’t know what. And then my whole system shuts down cold. It’s dead.”
Denis laughed: “I’m just hoping I don’t see a big old Tomahawk missile coming over the hill at me someday.”
He said the problem happened often during the first few weeks that he had the system.
“Then they e-mailed me an upgrade and we punched it in through an interlock. That picked up the upgrade and improved it a lot. But it still happens.
“It’s not so bad now. I can exit and re-boot in about a minute. At first, it would take me hours to get it running again.”
Denis said he mounted the antenna on the roof of the cab in 2004, but with the rolling landscape, the height gave him minor errors. For 2005, he plans to mount the antenna to the hood.
He bought his Zynx X-15 with a Setter MAX antenna in the spring of 2004, after finishing his spring burn off. Over the summer, he sprayed 10,000 acres with the guidance unit. Although it is capable of processing three kinds of signals, he has only operated it on the free WAAS signal.
“I’m one of the last people around here to get GPS so I’ve talked to people with just about every possible system,” he said.
“They’re all complaining about accuracy and they’re all thinking about upgrading to better quality. That’s why I decided to start out with the best equipment I could find. The complete Zynx with antenna cost $13,100; probably just about the most expensive system on the market at that time.”
Denis said he has already recovered half the price of the system, even though he didn’t use it a full season. It will have paid for itself by the end of 2005, he added.
“There was one 40-acre patch last year where I had to use my foam marker because they had shut down my GPS. I went back later and looked at that patch and I had three-foot skips and three-foot overlaps all over the place. That can add up to about four acres on a quarter. Then I checked where I had been using the Zynx and it was the closest thing to perfect you could imagine.”
His spraying has also become more efficient with the addition of rooster nozzles at the boom tips, increasing each spray pass to 80 feet from 60.
“We could never do that with a foam marker. You need a good, accurate GPS to make that work for you.”
The end nozzles require 70 pounds of pressure to work properly. The Bubble Jet nozzles on the main boom perform well up to 90 psi. With the 80-foot spread, running at 21 km-h and putting down three gallons per acre, he can cover a quarter section in 45 minutes. Now that he is confident in the guidance system, Denis is considering going to a 90-foot boom, which will give him a 110-foot pass.
The system’s small screen has also been a problem.
“It’s so hard to follow. I think any of the other screens from other companies are far better than this. It’s such a tiny screen. After 10,000 acres spraying, it really hurts.
“But the answer to that is autosteer. My plan is to put autosteer on the tractor for seeding, at least one of the harvesters for straight cut combining and one for the sprayer. I’ll have to buy one more complete system to get everything set up the way I want it.”
Vernon Bartz, at Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., said his 1,000 acre farm is made up entirely of irregularly shaped fields.
“There’s not a rectangle anywhere to be found and that’s a problem for spraying. You can’t afford to leave those missed strips unsprayed. You must spray them. But dividing a 90-foot boom into two 45-foot sections just isn’t good enough. You need smaller, more precise sections.”
Bartz said he may be 70 years old, but he’s not too old to learn the latest technology. In 2004, he equipped his sprayer with a Zynx X10 and a Setter MAX antenna that he runs on the WAAS signal. He divided the boom into six individual 15-foot sections, each with it’s own motorized ball valve for on and off. He then asked the Zynx to control the sections.
“Say you’ve finished spraying a field and you’re driving over to the approach. The Zynx finds any skips as you’re driving across the field and turns on the appropriate set of nozzles just as you’re driving over that spot,” Bartz said.
“When we first got it, we pole marked everything just to see how accurate it was. We asked for a one-foot overlap and that’s exactly what it gave us.”
Bartz said the system cost $22,000 including taxes and six ball valves at $1,000 each.
