W.A.A.S SIGNAL

That was the impression I was getting from the JD dealer, that the ITC unit will show a heading line on WASS but it won't connect to the auto steer to be functional so could only use it as a visual. So unfortunately I have an ITC sitting here that will soon be mostly worthless come the end of the year or when ever the switch is due to be flipped.

It all depends on what you're doing. For many things like tilling, waas is good enough. I've had waas on my combines and swather for a while and that's plenty good enough. I think even broad acre seeding would be fine with waas.

I spent some time analysing the can bus messages from the itc and it's actually not too difficult to intercept the messages and change one byte to pretend it's sf1 and Auto steer is happy to steer with waas. I don't have my notes with me at this moment but can comment more on this later.

It’s not good enough for seeding between rows but adequate for everything else broad acre IMO. Been using it last 15 years or so and so have many others. Years ago i remember some days it would switch number of satellites it was using often and move around a fair bit if only receiving 5-6 signals. Last several years usually receiving 10-11 signals and way better than WASS accuracy claims. Happy with it and price is right.

I agree waas is plenty for broadacre...I still buy a rangepoint sub for spraying but the cost went up a big jump a year or two ago. I like torriems Idea of intercepting the traffic for those john deere thingys...

I would assume that you would have to write your own controller software and build a small board to splice in...not sure though but it sounds like it could keep some hardware useful for someone that wanted to play with it...

Spraying with WAAS is, well, barely okay. You'd have to overlap a bit more to make sure you don't have any skips. WAAS is good to about a foot pass to pass, depending on how long the pass is. Accuracy (coming back to the same spot on another day) is about 1 or 2 metres.  In Canada, WAAS works better on north/south passes than east/west.  This is because WAAS corrections are intended for the continental US, and the farther north you go away from the US border, the less accurate the corrections are.

I don't think Ag Express could wring any more accuracy out of an itc receiver. Also theoretically the itc receiver will not even be able to use WAAS after 2024. The GPS satellites themselves are changing frequencies (WAAS corrections are carried over the GPS satellites on the same frequencies as GPS), and the ITC cannot receive on the newer bands.  The US Gov't keeps pushing the frequency change back as their own departments are not ready for the change yet.  The original changeover was scheduled to be complete by Jan 1, 2021, which is why John Deere decided to end their SF1 signals for the ITC on that date.  However with the date pushed back, and likely pushed back further, there's no reason John Deere couldn't delay their SF1 change also, giving ITC receivers a bit more life.

We can talk about this more for sure. If you know anyone that likes to dabble in arduino microcontrollers, this is very similar to that. A bit of C programming experience is useful too.

I know the frequencies are changing in general, including WAAS. A lot of GPS hardware was capable of the new frequencies from the beginning as they were in the works for long time. I suspect the STS will continue working just fine, or else you'd have heard about it from Outback by now, since the original deadline was Jan 1, 2021.  And I haven't heard anything to indicate any other brands are going to stop working. 

I could be way off base about my understanding of WAAS and the upcoming frequency changes.