Today's farm runs on data. Autosteer, variable-rate prescriptions, weed maps pushed to the cab mid-field — none of it works if the machine can't maintain a connection. In rural Montana, that's not a hypothetical. Dead zones exist. RTK base stations are often forty miles away. The coverage that shows "one bar" in town goes to nothing at the section's edge.
FarmLink is how we solved that for our own operations, then productized it. Broadband connectivity via satellite with LTE failover, paired with a local RTK base station installed by the same crew that handles SoilOptix mapping and FarmDefender™ installs. The result: ±2.5 cm corrections from a base station you own, broadband bandwidth that doesn't depend on the nearest cell tower, and automatic failover so the connection doesn't drop during a pass.
What FarmLink actually does
The connectivity problem on farms is usually two things stacked on top of each other: internet coverage gaps and RTK correction degradation over distance. FarmLink addresses both at once.
For internet: satellite broadband puts 100+ Mbps bandwidth on the farm regardless of cell coverage — fixed at the shop or mobile on the machine, with automatic LTE failover when satellite briefly reorients. No manual switching. Prescription maps load. As-applied data uploads. The connection is there when you need it.
For RTK: a local base station — installed at the shop, grain site, or farmstead during any FarmLink engagement — delivers corrections via NTRIP to any modern receiver. Sub-2-inch passes instead of the 3–4 inch results you get from a correction network base forty miles away, at lower latency, with no dependency on a vendor network staying operational. You own the base. You know where the signal comes from.
FarmDefender™ ships with FarmLink onboard. If you're running see-and-spray, the connectivity infrastructure is already there. For other equipment — seeders, sprayers, grain carts — we configure FarmLink to feed RTK corrections to whatever receiver brand you're running via NTRIP, the protocol every major terminal has supported for years.