Today we’re going to show you how to use a U-blox F9 receiver with Point One’s Polaris RTK network.
First, you’ll want to connect your receiver to your computer and make sure that the antenna has a clear and open view of the sky. After you’ve done that, go ahead and install Ucenter, which is available from the Ublox website. Then open it on your computer.
Once it starts, you’ll want to make sure that you connect to the proper port for your receiver. You can do that by simply clicking on the item on the top and checking that you’re connected to the correct comport. This will be different depending on your computer. In our case, it’s Com 27. To make sure things are working correctly, you can look on the menu on the right and you should see that the fix mode is showing something like 3D or something similar that ultimately indicates that the position is coming through correctly from the receiver.
Now, in order to enable the RTK service, we need to use an NTRIP client which is conveniently built into Ucenter. Click on the receiver menu and then go to the NTRIP client option. From there you’ll have some fields that you have to fill out. The address is going to be polaris.pointonenav.com. If you’re in the EU, you’ll want to make sure to use the polaris-eu.pointonenav.com address. The port will be 2101 and then the username and password are available on the Point One website.
So to get those for you simply go into your favorite browser, log into the Point One website, and then click on add device. You can name your device anything you want. We’ll call ours here Ublox. And then when we click on that device we’ll see that we have a username and a password under the NTRIP header here. Go ahead and copy that username to your clipboard, put it into the dialog here, do the same for the password and then hit the update source table button. Select the Polaris NTRIP mount point and then make sure that the request interval is set to 30 seconds. Hit the ok button and then you’ll notice that there is a green icon on the bottom bar indicating that you’re correctly connected to the Polaris RTK service.
After a few seconds you’ll also notice that the fixed mode has changed from 3D to 3D/DGNSS/FIXED. The fixed indicates that you’re getting the highest possible accuracy from your F9 receiver and have successfully connected to the Point One Polaris RTK service. We can also go back to the Point One website and see that the U-blox device that we’ve created has a green checkbox indicating that it is receiving a good position from the receiver and that the position is accurately being reflected on the map in the upper right. Now you can see that you’ve successfully connected your receiver to Point One’s Polaris network. You can now use your RTK receiver in your application and enjoy centimeter-accurate positions.
