Conclusion
This companion opened with a perception gap: building a base station conjures a single, difficult picture, when the reality spans a genuine range, most of which is nowhere near that hard.
Building a base station is not one task. It is a range, from a survey-in established in minutes to a fully commissioned monument built over a month, and matching the actual method to the actual job is the real skill this companion has been teaching.
The Range, One Last Time
A base station broadcasts its position and its raw observations, nothing more, and a rover solves its own position by differencing against that stream, a mechanism that never verifies the base's own coordinate, only inherits it. Establishing that coordinate can happen in minutes, through plain survey-in, HAS, or a network correction, in a middle tier through independent re-occupations or rapid-static processing, or over a full month through complete commissioning. Whatever coordinate results is never truly final, since a later refinement can be carried backward into work already done. And building a base at all is only the right answer when existing infrastructure does not already serve the job better.
None of the methods in this companion are lesser versions of each other. Each one is the right tool for a specific combination of accuracy needs, available time, and available infrastructure, and no single method is correct by default.
What Actually Got Easier
Modern hardware, inexpensive radios, and free or low-cost correction services have made the quick end of this range dramatically more approachable than it used to be. None of that changed what the rigorous end genuinely requires. Knowing which end a given project actually needs, and choosing deliberately rather than defaulting to habit or assumption, is what this companion has been built to teach.
Building a base station spans a real range of effort and rigor, and the right method depends entirely on what a specific project actually needs, not on which end of the range happens to be most familiar. The easy end of this range has gotten genuinely easier. The judgment required to choose well has not.
The next base this method gets applied to will very likely turn out to need far less effort than the perception gap this companion opened with would have suggested, or, just as usefully, will turn out to genuinely deserve the rigor of the far end, known clearly rather than assumed.