Precision-Nerd

This morning I have been working on making sure that all of our GPS equipment is insured. This is a tricky situation and a lot of people don’t know how you need to insure all of your GPS equipment. There are a few things you need to be aware of.  If you have anything with a Serial Number you had better make sure that you have it insured.  And just because you have your monitor insured it does not mean that your activations in that monitor are insured.  A lot of companies will not replace activations that they can not get taken off of the monitor, either by software or sending the hardware to them.  John Deere is a real stickler on this, as I’m sure others are.  Usually the activations are the biggest cost out of the entire purchase.

Here is how I breakdown everything for the insurance.

• Displays
• Receivers
• Activations
• RTK Equipment (radio, modem)
• Steering Equipment (ATU, Ez-Steer, etc;)
• Application Equipment (Rate Controllers, Ez-Boom)

Anything with a serial number should be listed separately with their own individual values.  It is very unlikely that if you group every thing together as one piece that it will all actually be on that same piece of equipment at the same time.

Don’t include the activations in the value of the display.  This is where a lot of people go wrong and say well I have my monitor insured so the activations are insured.  Insurance is likely going to only pay for hardware cost, not what you might say is on the display, unless you list them out individually and tell them what piece of equipment the activation is on.  What I am sending to my agent has the activations listed with the serial number of the display/receiver the activation is currently on.  I am sure there are ways you can prove this after the fact, but I for one do not want to get into a paper battle with Insurance.

Its not hard to have $15000 wrapped up in a single display and that could be financially hard to replace without insurance.  We all know anything can happen at any time.  Fire, theft, accidents.  It is a good safety net to have all of this stuff insured in case something does happen.

There are a lot of questions and arguments floating about which signal level you should be on for your operations.  In general, there are 3 signal levels.  Free(WAAS, SF1) +/- 8″ Pass to Pass, Paid Subscription Via Satellite(SF2, OmniStar, Excludes Trimble RTx) +/-2″ or 4″ Pass to Pass, and RTK <1″ all the time. Now, there are multiple different ways to get RTK corrections but it should all represent close to the same accuracy.  Everyone is the same, I want the most bang for my buck.  But, can you really save money by staying with the Free service when you should really have the Paid Subscription? Continue reading →

I went out on an AMS service call the other day.  The customer was not one of my regular customers so I didn’t know him very well.  The night before one of our techs was out working on his combine. The tech was telling me that he was having a problem with the map flipping on his 2600.  I told him to let the customer know I’d be out in the morning to put an update in the 2600, iTC, and ATU.  When I got there, I was sincerely surprised.  The customer told me that he went and downloaded the update last night and updated it himself.  The only problem he had was when he updated it the ATU had lost its activation code.  A quick call to Greenstar Activations and he was up and running again. Continue reading →

I realized I haven’t done a tutorial on here yet, so here goes the first.  I just answered a question like this on NAT and thought this might be a good one to do with the planting season coming up. Continue reading →