by Lucas Veale

Planters are rolling strong across the area.  Conditions remain a bit damp, but with the promise of warmer weather on the way farmers are seizing the opportunity.  Continue to see the normal startup issues of customers trying to remember how their planter monitor, Autotrac, documentation, and Swath Control function and need to be setup or they need help getting all of the hoses and electrical connection hooked up correctly.

We have seen several customer having the problem with the receiver “white triangle” showing up at the hitch position which will make the section control malfunction.  Most of these have been corrected by simply changing the axle position to the opposite setting and then back to the correct setting.  However, Jeff Kraft, store manager of Sloan Implement in Hamel, IL found an instance where he had to change the offsets before it would allow it the position the receiver correctly.  Make sure you customers get out and dig to make sure the row command is working correctly!!!!!  Any other form of checking is inaccurate.

The new 1775 ExactEmerge high speed planter (pictured below) is in action and has had some field time.  Derek Sloan, product support specialist in Assumption comments on his experience pulling the new planter.  “ I got the chance to run the new high speed planter for a day and was very impressed with how well the machine ran. Singulation was excellent even at speeds around 10 mph and ride quality really did not suffer as much as I thought it would staying around 88 percent with downforce around 80-90. Population was even across the planter as well. Having the proper tillage tool running in front of this planter preparing the seed bed will play a big role in the effectiveness at higher speeds. Still waiting on seed to come up so we can see how the spacing really looks.”

Derek also reports that he has seen a barn lot nuisance code from the PM2 indicating that the down force sensors are out of range.  He reports that once it gets in the field the code does not return.

Matt Dehlinger, product support specialist in Effingham, IL reports that if you have a Kinze KPM III that will not keep the speed cal number you need to make sure you shut off the monitor when you complete it rather than turning off the key.

Justin Bickel, product support specialist in Virden, IL reports that on planters with more than 24 rows the PA1 controller can disappear.  The population will continue to function but the doubles and skips will turn red and show poor spacing.  Simply going into the monitor setup and turning off all of the seed sensors for all rows and then turning all rows back on will alleviate the problem.

If you have a customer with a Precision 20/20 monitor on a John Deere Seedstar XP planter and they call you because the monitor is not working correctly, unhook the 20/20 seed sense module back on the planter.  Numerous reports of this fixing planter monitor issues.

Lucas Benning, product support specialist in Vandalia, IL is making gains on the installation of the 4 new RTK base stations.  Three of them are in place with one to go.

Matt Sweitzer, product support specialist in Atwood, IL worked with wireless data transfer this week. He emphasizes the need for all components to have the latest software for a successful start up.  He also found that A/B guidance lines will not transfer from the display.  Only the documentation data will be sent.

He has also seen a 450 MHZ radio glitch.  He states that is says the radio is not responding when you first configure or turn on the system.  Cancel the warning and everything seems to work correctly.