SparkFun RTK Facet Hookup Guide
Nate Introduction
The RTK Facet from SparkFun is our most advanced GNSS receiver to date. It's your one stop shop for high precision geolocation and surveying needs. For basic users, it’s incredibly easy to get up and running and for advanced users, the RTK Facet is a flexible and powerful tool.
With just a few minutes of setup, the RTK Facet is one of the fastest ways to take centimeter grade measurements.
By connecting your phone to the RTK Facet over Bluetooth, your phone can act as the radio link to provide correction data as well as receive the NMEA output from the device. It’s how $10,000 surveying devices have been operating for the past decade - we just made it easier, smaller, and a lot more economical.
Watch A Quick Setup
Required Materials
The RTK Facet has all you need built into one small unit. In addition, the RTK Facet Kit includes everything you might need as well. The only thing you need to add is your own tablet or cell phone (currently Android is supported; iOS support planned).
Depending on your setup you may want to use your phone for RTCM correction data. If a source is not available online, you will need a 2nd RTK Facet setup in base mode and a radio link connecting the Base to the Rover. We'll go into details but we designed RTK Facet to work with these 100mW 915MHz telemetry radios out of the box.
To charge the RTK Facet you will need a USB C cable and a power supply. These are included with the kit but any USB C port should charge the Facet at a maximum rate of 1A per hour.
Suggested Reading
GNSS RTK is an incredible feat of engineering that has been made easy to use by powerful GNSS receivers such as the ZED-F9P by u-blox (the receiver inside RTK Facet). The process of setting up an RTK system will be covered in this tutorial but if you want to know more about RTK here are some good tutorials to brush up on: