Hardware, Antenna, and Monument
The physical side of building a base station is, for most modern equipment, the genuinely easy part of this entire companion. A handful of decisions, made once, carry a project a long way.
Selecting hardware, placing the antenna, and choosing a monument are the physical foundation every method in this companion depends on. None of these decisions require specialized skill with current equipment, but each one carries consequences that show up much later if made carelessly.
Choosing Hardware Proportional to the Job
A base station's receiver and antenna need to support whatever constellations, frequencies, and correction delivery method the project actually intends to use, covered in detail in the earlier chapter on what a base actually sends. A temporary, single-project base has very different requirements than a semi-permanent installation expected to run unattended for weeks, and buying far more capability than a project needs is a common, harmless overcorrection, while buying too little quietly limits every method covered later in this companion.
Hardware selection is one of the few decisions in this entire process with no real downside to over-preparing. The failure mode worth watching for is under-provisioning, choosing a receiver that cannot support the correction method a project actually needed.
Antenna Placement, Briefly
A base antenna wants a clear, unobstructed view of the sky, away from large reflective surfaces that invite multipath, discussed at length in the third companion of this series, and mounted securely enough that wind or foot traffic cannot disturb it during a session. None of this is exotic. It is the same site awareness that already matters for a rover, applied to a point that will now sit still, uncorrected by anyone, for the entire session.
A base antenna does not need a more exotic location than a rover would. It needs the same clear sky view and multipath awareness, held steady and undisturbed for the length of the session, rather than any special site requirement unique to being a base.
Choosing a Monument for the Job at Hand
A temporary base for a single day's work can sit on a simple, stable point, a driven pin, a marked feature, anything unlikely to move during the session and easy to reoccupy if needed later that same day. A semi-permanent base, expected to anchor a project for weeks or months, deserves a more deliberate monument, set with enough stability that it can be trusted to represent the same physical point across repeated sessions and, potentially, future refinement of its coordinate.
A project needs a base for one afternoon only, with no plans to return to the same point later. Does that project need the same monument rigor as a semi-permanent installation? No, and over-investing in monumentation for a single-session base is effort spent on a problem the project does not actually have.
Hardware, antenna placement, and monument choice are the physical foundation of every method ahead in this companion, and each should be sized to the actual job, a temporary base and a semi-permanent one calling for genuinely different levels of care, not the same rigor applied by default.
Before walking through every way to establish a coordinate from scratch, it is worth asking whether that step is even necessary at all.