#36
...just farmers spending a few thousand dollars an hour of their own money on chemicals, wages fuel that needs to be placed accurately with large machines. It has got to the stage that wheels now do stop if RTK goes down or marine beacon signal drops out because without differential the potential losses from over or under spray is just to great. Just go and ask any larger farmer if he would go back to non diff auto steer and see what his answer is. Machines especially Spray machines don't even come with a mechanical marking option any more. New seeders are all linked to GPS variable rate application and reliant on it. So it isn't life threating its however becoming very reliant on it so I am told.
Its been over 30 years since i last operated broadacre rig so am not conversant with the latest tech. Though i can imagine just how useful GPS would be to operations.
Now, if GPS were lost to farmers tomorrow i'd imagine it would take all of a day or two to fit up the old fashioned markers. Not as efficient as GPS though all farmers would be on the same playing field so no marketable price differences there. There'd be no near blind farmer 'traffic control' to worry about either. If it were only farmers that were using GPS then it would not be a terrorist target of interest because of the minimal impact from the loss of GPS.
Unfortunately it seems there are some in the Oz aviation community who seem to want to make our airspace more and more reliant on a single navigation and traffic system.
The more reliant we become on GPS the bigger the target it becomes...
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