Fairfield County, Ohio, USA | The solar storm last weekend made me think. It was rainy here, so we couldn't do anything in the fields anyway, but if we had been able to, I realized we wouldn't have been able to spray -- our new sprayer doesn't have any ground-speed source. We have it connected to an Ag Leader InCommand 1200, and it exclusively uses GPS for its speed source. I suppose we could've tried to play the whole "constant pressure and constant speed" game, but I feel like that's a fool's errand -- our fields are relatively small and very irregularly shaped, so speed changes happen all the time. We could've hooked up the old sprayer (it has a wheel speed sensor for its ancient controller), but it's smaller and doesn't have foam markers, so alignment would've been impossible.
We still have markers on our corn planters and the new sprayer. Not on the drill, though we often plant into cover crops so I feel like markers would probably be pretty worthless there anyway.
I'm not paranoid about there being a bunch of solar storms keeping us all out of the fields, but it's probably good to think this through anyway, in case something else happens that could be similarly mitigated. The other day while brush-hogging, my dad got into an altercation with a tree branch, and the GNSS receiver lost that particular fight (sigh). I happen to have a spare receiver and harness on-hand, but I usually don't (which I'm also now reconsidering).
But I digress. Do y'all have a backup ground-speed source anywhere? Radar? Wheel speed sensor? I'm not sure whether I'd rather put something on each tractor, or on the implements where it would be useful. |
Backup ground-speed source
