Today we are going to show you how to connect a Septentrio Mosaic X-5 receiver to the Point One Polaris RTK network.
Start by connecting your receiver to your computer and then connecting the receiver to an RTK capable antenna that has a clear and open view of the sky. Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to start the RX control software available from Septentrio’s website.
Create a connection to the receiver. In this case we’ll use an existing connection and now that we’ve created the connection we can see that the device is just starting up. So it doesn’t yet have ephemeris data, but that will just take a second and it’ll get everything it needs from the satellites. While we’re doing that, we can go into the tools menu and launch DataLink. DataLink is an application also made by Septentrio that allows us to connect different ports on the device to other services. One of those services is going to be an NTRIP client that connects us to the Polaris RTK network. The first thing we’ll do is on the connection one panel, click on the Serial button. Yours may say something like TCP client that’s okay. Click on that button and then click on the Serial tab. And then go ahead and select the connection to your Septentrio device. In our case, we’ll use the Virtual USB Com 1 link and hit ok.
You can hit the connect button and that’ll now open the connection to the port that’s on your Mosaic device. In connection two, we’re going to want to configure our NTRIP connection. So go ahead, select the NTRIP tab and then under the host you want to type in polaris.pointonenav.com. If you’re in the EU you want to make sure to use polaris-eu.pointonenav.com. Then hit the Edit button. Make sure that the port is set to 2101 and then select the Polaris stream from the menu. Under the authentication we’re going to want to enter the credentials given to us on the Point One website.
So navigate with your favorite web browser to the Point One website and create a device. Hit the plus icon in the upper right and here we’ll call this Septentrio. Click on the device and then we’ll see an NTRIP username and password available. We’ll go ahead and copy the username, enter that into DataLink and then do the same for the password. Hit the OK button, hit OK again and then hit Connect.
Now you want to make sure that the Link 1 is set in the Connection 2 panel, and conversely the Link 2 is checked in the Connection 1 panel. This makes it so that these two ports are virtually connected and sending data between each other. If we look in the bottom left we can notice that there’s no data currently being set because we still have to do some configuration.
Go back to RXControl and now we can see that the receiver has a position but it’s not yet using RTK and that’s because we still need to set up the communication. So under the Communication menu we want to go into the output settings and then select NMEA output. Under the Stream 1 panel we’re going to select USB 1 and then check the GGA and then set the interval to 1 second. This is configuring the receiver to output GGA messages at one time per second on the USB 1 interface. Go ahead and hit Ok and then we’ll notice in the DataLink program that data has started to come out of Connection 1 and flow to Connection 2. This is the GGA data that we just enabled.
And then now that that GGA data is going to your NTRIP client, you’re receiving corrections back from the Point One Polaris network. If we look here now in the RXControl, we’ll notice that our mode has changed to RTK fixed. This is the highest degree of accuracy available for all Septentrio modules, and we can see here that the sigma values in north, east and up are measured in millimeters. In this case 8 mm.
Congratulations! You’ve now connected your Septentrio receiver to the Point One Polaris RTK service and you’re able to use high precision RTK in your application.
