Yep: this time from EFarmer, a fairly new concern based in the Ukraine and the Netherlands. It offers three packages under the FieldBee banner: manual steer, manual steer with an RTK base station and the one featured here, RTK-corrected full autosteer using an electric motor.
A reasonable place to start with steering kits is to see what comes in the box, how easy it all is to fit and what it costs. Actually that’s three places, but still. There are several bits of hardware to the FieldBee Autosteer System: a DC electric motor for the steering column, a controller/gyroscope unit to sense tilt, pitch and yaw, process data and direct the steering motor; a L2 GNSS receiver for signals from GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BaiDou satellite networks plus RTK correction, and finally a WiFi/mobile network router able to take in a correction signal and send data out to the wider world.
FieldBee uses a MDU-G4 steering motor, as do Ag Leader, Müller-Elektronik, Reichhardt and Teejet. Cost of this plus the controller/gyroscope unit is around €5,000, though steering-ready tractors can use FieldBee’s hydraulic unit instead. The dual-frequency L2 receiver is EFarmer’s own development, coming home at €1,300 before VAT. A singlefrequency L1 alternative is €700, though it won’t be the best where trees and such interfere with satellite signals. For field testing, RTK correction was supplied over the
mobile phone network.
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