Android Phone GPS for farming????

[MikeFarm]

Hi all

Just for info here whilst discussing Android apps; a farm here in Australia has started up Farm Apps
The instruction manual for F-Track Live manual is here Farm Apps Manuals
It looks a really useful app for big farms that have more than one person managing them.

Mike

 

[California]

I have a Magellan Meridian of about the same vintage ... and I have consistently achieved 3 meter accuracy with it over the years, as long as I was patient and the tree cover wasn't too dense. Here's a description of one project I completed with it: http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/rural-living/62802-question-about-land-surveying.html#post701551

Great story about the new orchard you discovered out in your back 40! Did that 'rent' settle down to be a friendly arrangement?


MikeFarm - that Farm Apps looks like a great set of farm management tools. When the guys in the field can use their smartphones to access the same data the office staff sees, there has to be an improvement in efficiency compared to verbal relay of project instructions etc. I'll bet they eventually add the sort of GPS/GIS module that I am looking for - it would be a natural next step.

 

[BillG_in_TX]

Great story about the new orchard you discovered out in your back 40! Did that 'rent' settle down to be a friendly arrangement?

Well, it was always friendly. In addition to use of the orchard, the lease also gives my neighbor grazing rights to my acreage (we still don't have a fence along that 2100' property line). He has 3 "pet" longhorns that wander both his and my property, which maintains our ag exemption for property tax purposes. However, as I describe later on in that thread, the raccoons seem to do all the harvesting in the orchard.

 

[chad22]

It seems like there are aps for everything.

Sorry to go off topic here. But I just had to post about this.

Reminds me of an app I heard about on the radio yesterday while waiting on mom at her doctors appointment.

There's now an app that will tweet you when your child has a wet diaper. xd. Funny the radio announcer asked if it would work for his depends when he got old. As his children wouldn't check his diapers for him. lol

Source: Huggies TweetPee App Tweets Parents When It痴 Time to Change Baby痴 Diaper - ABC News



Chad

 

[California]

Get a Garmin GPS unit. ...accuracy of about +- 15 feet to 20 ft. Maybe an eTrex 20 which is about US $200. But look into what models are available. I have an eTrex Vista HCx for bush walking. I get 5m accuracy from it even in very steep gulleys.

When you are at a new tree just add a waypoint. You can just click a button and add a location and even give it a number.

Then download QGIS from Welcome to the Quantum GIS Project which is an open source (and free) GIS application and you can read in the waypoints and create a map of them and keep you map up-to-date with new trees. Make a layer of "new trees" and maybe a separate layer of "diseased trees" or "trees to cut down" etc.

...

The QGIS would work on your main Windows machine. You save the waypoints in the handheld GPS unit then the crappy Garmin software running on Windows downloads it from the GPS unit to your PC. It can save it in an open format called GPX (it's an plain text XML file of points). That can be opened and edited in any plain text editor. The GPX file can then be imported into the QGIS program. You can also if you have an aerial picture of your forest/farm have that as a layer in QGIS. So that's really all done in Windows. Use the Garmin in the field just to get GPS locations and also to navigate you to a specific spot.

Basically I think the Android phone wont cut it for what you want to do but a Garmin + QGIS will. Besides its always fun to play with technology on your farm
Mike

You guys are leading me off into temptation!

Ok, I went on Ebay and bought a new-in-box Garmin Etrex 10. $95. I had first gone to REI (backpacker store) which claimed they had one in stock ($119 w tax) but they didn't. This seems to be the least expensive GPS on the market that will take downloaded GPX destination coordinates, and sees the Russian satellites as well as the US ones which I hope will improve accuracy under partial tree cover. It doesn't have a decent basemap, just state lines and apparently major highways built in, and it won't take downloaded maps, it accepts only coordinates tables. I think its intended for the serious map n compass hiker and for geocache hobbyists. Claimed accuracy 3 meters. We shall see ... It should be here by next week.

 

[MikeFarm]

Hiya

You will have a lot of fun and use from it. I also have all my fencelines, gates, tanks and stuff done by walking around the paddocks and taking GPS readings. Having a good map of your farm is useful.

Mike