Who builds this, and why

Why it exists

Centimeter-accurate positioning has been a solved problem for decades. Getting hold of it has not. The established vendors sell it in five-figure bundles through dealer networks, tied to a display you also have to buy and a brand of machine you may not own. At the other end, the hobby market sells bare circuit boards that work very well if you enjoy soldering connectors and hand-editing correction-server configs at the edge of a field.

There is a large gap between those two, and it is full of people who need real accuracy and get sold neither: the operator with a hundred acres and a phone mount, the contractor setting out a site, the surveyor who wants a second receiver without a second mortgage, the developer who wants position data their app can actually trust.

Northing is built for that gap. A finished, supported receiver at a price a single operator can justify, with a corrections subscription that renews at one flat price, and a phone as the display — because you already own a very good one.

Who builds it

Northing is made by Oran Dynamics, a small company in Ireland. Small is accurate rather than modest: the embedded firmware, the iOS app, the Bluetooth protocol, the field-test rig, and these pages are the work of one engineer. There is no marketing department writing the claims on this site, which is the main reason the claims on this site have test conditions attached to them.

The trade-off is honest in both directions. You are buying from a company that will answer support email itself and knows exactly why the receiver did what it did — and from a company that is not going to pretend it has a 24-hour call centre.

How it gets built

The working method is borrowed from instrument-making rather than consumer electronics, and it comes down to four habits.

Measure, then claim. Every number on this site comes from a logged field session and carries the condition it was measured under. "±2.5 cm" without "RTK Fixed, open sky" beside it is decoration, not a specification. Where the measurements are unflattering — a convergence-based mode that drifts to tens of centimeters while driving, for instance — the unflattering number gets published too, in RTK vs PPP.

Assume the failure, not the demo. GNSS engines have a habit of reporting centimeter confidence long after their correction stream has silently died. We measured it happening — the quality flags froze while the true error grew — so the receiver runs an independent watchdog that raises Stale Corrections to every connected app within 30 seconds, whatever the engine underneath claims. (how that works.)

It has to be un-brickable. Firmware updates are cryptographically signed and land on an A/B partition that rolls itself back if the new version misbehaves; there is a crash-loop safe mode underneath that, and a browser-based recovery flasher underneath that. A receiver on a roof bracket in February is not a thing you should have to post back to anyone.

No lock-in, structurally. The Bluetooth protocol is published and the SDK is free, so any app can use the receiver without permission. Cancel the subscription and the hardware keeps working on the free Northing Global mode rather than turning into a paperweight. Those are architecture decisions, not promises — they are harder to reverse later, which is the point.

Where the project actually is

As of August 2026: the electronics and firmware are working and field-tested — the accuracy, recovery and dropout numbers quoted across this site are from real drive sessions logged in July 2026. The pilot enclosure is in industrial design, which is why the product image on the home page is still labelled a concept render rather than a photo. Pilot units are expected late 2026.

That status line gets updated as things move, and the render is replaced with real photographs the moment real hardware exists. If this paragraph ever goes stale, it is a bug — tell us.

Getting in touch

[email protected] reaches a person. Pre-sales questions, coverage checks for a specific location, SDK questions, and "will this work with my setup" are all fair game — see support for what to expect.