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Comment by RedlineTriad | Hacker News Reader

I just learned that Switzerland has a nationwide RTK network for cm level positional accuracy using GPS, Galileo, GALILEO, and/or Beidou, GNSS systems. And they have a nice map of all the station locations[0].

It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use, but it seems to be rather new.

It would be interesting to see what possibilities a totally free nationwide RTK system would open up.

Swisstopo is a government organization that already provides many services like highly accurate maps for free.

[0] https://shop.swipos.ch/Map/SensorMap.aspx

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> It's a bit of shame that the pricing seems to be rather steep for frivolous use

The pricing norms for RTK correction networks were set 20 years ago, when operating your own base station meant buying a second $20,000 dual frequency receiver, and taking an extra guy any time you go out to do a survey, whose job is just to guard the base station.

This made a $2000 a year network correction service seem like great value for money!

Some networks offer more affordable options these days - such as weekly and hourly licenses for drone pilots.

This should be another crowdsourced sensor fabric network, like air quality sensors, AIS, ADS-B, distributed SDR, etc.

https://www.onocoy.com/ seems to be doing just that.

I have no affiliation, and no strong opinion on their specific approach, but I do find it interesting and have thought about running a node, especially since enjoying fiddling around with LoRa / Meshtastic.

http://rtk2go.com/

We've got a ublox ZED-F9P feeding into that. Station name JasonWiebeDairy. We set it up for RTK for AgOpenGPS - a FOSS auto-steer/mapping/control for agriculture.

https://docs.centipede.fr/ Currently only really working in France and Hungary.

The swiss solution does come with per hour pricing but it's still 0.50 CHF / minute. Which is still very expensive for hobbyists.

I feel like the marginal costs for users is so low that it would be better if it were handled as a common good like GNSS systems themselves.

That is insane. My mower runs for ~100 minutes per day. This means 50CHF per day which as I see is around 50 euros. Home made base station cost with unicore gnss is around 220 euros…

The traditional use case was for surveyors to use it. In that regard it's pretty cheap.

Finland has a free nationwide RTK network. It’s nominally only for testing and R&D use, tho, and you have to renew your account every three months.

https://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/en/finpos/rtk

However, you can easily setup your own RTK base station for a few hundred bucks. Very convenient to use the free service to determine the static coordinates of your base station.

Luxembourg's RTK system is completely free to use: https://act.public.lu/fr/gps-reseaux/spslux1.html

In Portugal there are 2 already, one free and one paid. The free one was implemented almost 20 years ago.

It amazes me that a country like Switzlerland only now implemented such a service, and quite expensive, nonetheless.

It's been running since 2016 at least in Switzerland, I was using it back then. And well, nothing is cheap in Switzerland. :)

Which network in Portugal provides this service for free?

I'm not totally sure why, but it was free for nonprofit research (university) use until 1-2 years ago. Now it's still cheaper than for the rest of the users, but still very expensive also for researchers.

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