A Rough Guide To Onocoy

Ono­coy is a GNSS DePIN project with a “bring your own” hard­ware invi­ta­tion. You buy a base sta­tion, set it up, and start pro­vid­ing its cor­rec­tion stream to Onocoy. 

The “bring your own” mod­el has a cou­ple advan­tages over projects that require you to use their hardware. 

First, you can eas­i­ly use your own data stream by con­nect­ing direct­ly with the receiv­er. Sec­ond, you can real­ly dive into the details of what you’re doing to see where you can improve. Third, using your own sta­tion requires you to learn a lit­tle bit more about the world of PNT (Posi­tion, Nav­i­ga­tion, Tim­ing), which is just flat out fascinating.

Of course, for us reg­u­lar (non-GNSS nerds), a “bring your own” sta­tion is a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing; it ain’t quite plug ‘n play. Let’s go through the broad strokes you’ll need to do, then get down into those details to make sure you max­i­mize your rewards.

First, you have to buy a base sta­tion. The good peo­ple over at Spark­Fun were gra­cious enough to send me over the best of what they have, which is a Spark­Fun RTK Mosi­ac X5.

Here it is sit­ting on my work­bench, mer­ri­ly col­lect­ing sig­nals and issu­ing out an RTK cor­rec­tion stream. Yes, I’ve cov­ered up the loca­tion of my top secret hid­den lair in San Diego.

I installed it in my office with the anten­na up on the roof. I used PoE (Pow­er over Eth­er­net) because I avoid WiFi con­nec­tions wher­ev­er I can. I’ve got a Ubiq­ui­ti router and PoE switch, so inject­ing pow­er and find­ing a port isn’t a problem. 

Still, for both anten­na and PoE I had to cut some holes in my wall and run cable through the walls and up to the roof. I think that’s fun work, but I also don’t have to do it every day.

The more sta­ble your anten­na on the roof, the bet­ter. Ide­al­ly the anten­na mount is bolt­ed on with zero (mil­lime­ter or less) wig­gle. I’ve got mine on a heavy duty non-pen­e­trat­ing roof mount. While it’s not per­fec­tion, it’s pret­ty darn stable. 

Ok, that’s the phys­i­cal deploy­ment side. Let’s jump into the geek-side and plug our faces into the computer.

To get the bare min­i­mum set­up for the Mosi­ac, just plug the thing in like I have (con­nect­ed to pow­er and eth­er­net and the anten­na), then nav­i­gate on your net­work to what­ev­er local IP you’ve set up. In my case, it’s 192.168.50.46. Obvi­ous­ly that’ll be dif­fer­ent for you. You’ll see when you go there the “Septen­trio” brand­ing; the Mosi­ac X5 is their most com­pact and high pre­ci­sion GNSS receiver.

Once you’re on the local IP for your Mosi­ac it’ll walk you through basic set­up. Spark­Fun has a guide that makes it dead sim­ple, here.

You’ll also need an Ono­coy account in order to take your shiny new RTK stream from the Mosi­ac and feed it into Ono­coy. You can set up over at console.onocoy.com. Once you’re there and signed up, open the Ref­er­ence Sta­tions tab and hit “Con­nect Server”.

Ono­coy has excel­lent doc­u­men­ta­tion on set­up and it will change over time. One thing I’ve learned with writ­ing these rough guides is that it’s far bet­ter for you if you refer to the pro­jec­t’s set up docs than mine, at least for basic set­up stuff.

Use the Ono­coy Instal­la­tion Guide to con­nect your sta­tion’s stream to the Ono­coy network. 

Once you’ve fin­ished set­ting up your Ono­coy & Mosi­ac, you should see some­thing like this on the Mosi­ac side:

That shows that you’re receiv­ing sig­nals from satel­lites, and feed­ing out a data stream to Ono­coy. Cool, right?

After 24 hours of hav­ing it up, your Ono­coy con­sole should look some­thing like this. I most­ly pay atten­tion to the Satel­lites and Sig­nals box­es, and spent a bunch of time com­par­ing with local stations.

The gen­er­al con­clu­sion I came to after look­ing at my sta­tion vs all the oth­er local ones (includ­ing ones clear­ly set up by pro­fes­sion­als) is that the Spark­Fun set­up I’ve got is as good as it gets out of the box; there’s noth­ing bet­ter on the mar­ket for what we’re doing.

The only real issue is that I’ve added a sta­tion in San Diego that either was­n’t des­per­ate­ly need­ed or is more use­ful than oth­ers but is in a deploy­ment area that’s already saturated.

If you’re think­ing of deploy­ing a sta­tion and your main moti­va­tion is the Ono­coy tokens, use the Esti­ma­tor tool avail­able on the Ono­coy Explor­er to get an idea of what you’ll earn.

That’s it for now! Poke around on both the Septen­trio & Ono­coy sites to learn more. Next up? How to use the Spark­Fun RTK Torch!