How Northing RTK works: centimeter corrections through your phone

Satellite positioning on its own is only accurate to a few meters. The error comes mostly from the atmosphere and from tiny imperfections in satellite clocks and orbits — and because those errors are measurable, they’re correctable. Northing RTK is the correction side of the system: a live data stream that lets the receiver turn meters into centimeters.

No base station, no radio, no second data plan

Classic RTK needs a base station near you — your own, or a network’s — plus a radio link to carry its corrections. Northing RTK works differently: corrections are modelled across entire continents and streamed over the internet, so there’s nothing to set up, survey in, power, or maintain on your side.

The delivery path is the phone you already carry. The app relays the stream to the receiver over Bluetooth at roughly 1 kbps — a trickle that works on one bar of signal, uses a few megabytes a day, and needs no cellular modem (or second data plan) in the receiver itself.

What it does in practice, measured

We publish measured behavior, not adjectives — these numbers come from logged dual-receiver drive sessions:

• Fixed within seconds of a cold start. RTK doesn’t converge; it fixes. There is no ten-minute warm-up.
• ±2.5 cm repeatable accuracy while fixed, open sky.
• Fixed 88% of a 40-minute drive that deliberately included tree cover, a bridge, and buildings — and 1–2 second recovery after each obstruction.
• A one-minute data dropout is a non-event. The receiver holds centimeter accuracy for about a minute unaided, degrades gradually rather than falling off a cliff, and was back to RTK-Fixed 24 seconds after the stream returned in our dropout testing.

The honesty feature

GNSS engines have an ugly habit: when a correction stream silently dies, they keep reporting centimeter confidence while the real error drifts. We measured this — quality flags, accuracy estimates, and correction-age fields all frozen while true error grew from 7 cm toward 40 cm.

So the receiver runs its own independent watchdog: if corrections stop flowing for 30 seconds, it flags “Stale Corrections” to every connected app, whatever the engine underneath claims. You’ll know the data connection needs attention before a pass goes crooked — not after.

One flat price

Northing RTK is included for the receiver’s first year, then renews at a flat $299 for 12 months — no per-hour metering, no usage tiers to predict, a reminder email before every renewal, and a fair-use ceiling stated in plain English in the terms. Where the service is available is spelled out region by region in the coverage guide.