J.D. Barnes Limited is now successfully operating GPS base stations from five locations in the Greater Toronto area and one in the Ottawa area. These base stations consist of a GPS unit with an antenna mounted on the building roofs which receive signals from orbiting satellites, compute corrections, and broadcast them through this central web site server. Real Time corrections can then be accessed with a CDMA 1x cellular modem from a remote GPS receiver which allows users to achieve centimetre level positioning accuracy.

RTK technology has been with us for several years now but the limited range of the radios used for communicating between units and the risk of an unattended receiver being stolen or damaged has made this technology inefficient and not very cost effective. GPSBaseNet allows the user to operate one GPS unit instead of two on site to achieve centimetre precision and has a wider range than ever before. The cellular link is very robust over the CDMA 1X network and improvements in the 1X hardware have allowed the roving GPS unit to be very portable and easy to operate.

J.D. Barnes Limited has been working closely with Leica Geosystems and Telus Mobility in creating this network of GPS base stations. In house software development and months of rigorous testing on-site using various technologies under extreme conditions have proven this system is ready for commercial use. The Markham, Milton, Whitby and Ottawa offices of J.D. Barnes Limited are using this technology on a day to day basis very successfully. Any one wishing to receive additional information about GPSBaseNet may contact Joe Young at (905) 477-3600 or by email: JYoung@jdbarnes.com.