Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | That is what I am doing. I use a Trimble 332 (same specs as 252) with Omnistar XP on a Deere 8120 with a Trimble Nav 2 Autopilot. The Interface is an Insight. Since the tractor was not Autotrac ready, I am using the Trimble hyd valve.
I am planting with a 12 row 30" Deere 1760. The land is quite flat and I am satisfied with the XP performance. I thought I'd start with XP and switch to HP if necessary. I have been satisfied well enough with XP not to switch.
I have no basis for comparison to judge whether HP would give better performance.
My planting is not perfect (whatever that means) but is far better than I had been doing myself. My major problem is making the turns correctly myself so that the planter is tracking squarely behind the tractor when I drop the planter. This is no fault of the auto steer system but a limitation of the tractor, planter and me. This situation would probably be better with a 16 row planter.
I would recommend starting with XP and switching to HP if necessary.
As you are probably aware there is the "Convergence Issue". This means that from a cold start it may take some time for the system to Converge to its best performance. During planting season, I typically left my planter parked in an open spot in the dooryard and left the GPS ON overnight so that I was ready to go in the morinings.
If the XP signal is lost while planting due to obstructions from trees etc., the system reverted back to VBS and then switched back to XP when the signal was regained. This only happened to me a couple of times since my land is pretty much in the wide open spaces. The Auto steering during those brief outages was very acceptable. I don't think having HP would be any better in those situations.
Keying the Mic on the two way business radio also caused a dropout probably due to the fact that the GPS antenna and radio antenna are fairly close to each other. Using a cell phone for communication solved that problem.
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Insight Auto Pilot Omnistar HP or XP
