SparkFun RTK Facet L-Band Hookup Guide
Nate Introduction
The RTK Facet L-Band 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 L-Band is a flexible and powerful tool.
With just a few minutes of setup, the RTK Facet L-Band is the fastest product currently on the market to take centimeter grade measurements.
With just the press of a button, the RTK Facet L-Band is the fastest way to take centimeter-grade measurements. With built-in corrections, 14mm Real Time Kinematic fixes are less than a minute away. By connecting your phone to the RTK Facet L-Band over Bluetooth®, your phone or tablet can receive the NMEA output and work most GIS software. This is exactly how $10,000 surveying devices have been operating for the past decade - we just made it faster, more precise, and a lot more economical.
Required Materials
The RTK Facet L-Band has all you need built into one small unit. In addition, the RTK Facet L-Band Kit includes everything you might need as well. The only thing you need to add is your own tablet or cell phone (Andriod and iOS are supported).
No external radio link or RTCM corrections are needed. The RTK Facet L-Band utilizes corrections from u-blox's PointPerfect service broadcast from a geosynchronous Inmarsat satellite. The only setup required is a WiFi SSID and password. Once entered, the device will provision itself and periodically (once a month) update the decryption keys necessary to use the PointPerfect service. The price of the RTK Facet L-Band includes a 12-month subscription. Additional years of service can be purchased.
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: