Monitoring and Validation
A base station that was working perfectly at setup can fail silently hours or weeks later, continuing to broadcast a stream that looks entirely normal to a rover while quietly no longer describing the truth. Catching that requires deliberate, ongoing checks, not a one-time setup verification.
A base station needs periodic monitoring for exactly the same reason any unattended equipment does: physical disturbance, power failure, or a subtle configuration drift can all degrade its output without ever producing an obvious, self-reported error.
What Can Actually Go Wrong After Setup
A monument can shift, from frost heave, vehicle contact, or simple settling, without any visible sign at the antenna itself. A power system can degrade gradually rather than failing outright. A radio link or NTRIP connection can drop and silently reconnect, producing gaps in the stream a rover might not clearly flag as anything unusual. None of these failures announce themselves the way a dead battery or a disconnected cable would.
A base's own status display reporting normal operation confirms the equipment is running. It does not confirm the antenna is still sitting exactly where it was when the coordinate was established.
A Practical Monitoring Routine
A periodic check of the base's own logged position, compared against its assumed coordinate, catches physical movement directly. Confirming the stream is still reaching rovers with the expected content, message set, rate, and constellations, catches a configuration or connectivity problem before it becomes a mystery on the rover end. For a longer installation, an occasional visual inspection of the physical setup, mount, antenna, enclosure, catches the kind of disturbance no remote check will ever reveal.
An RTK rover reporting FIX consistently while connected to a base does not confirm that base has remained stable since it was established. A shifted but otherwise functioning base can still produce a precise, repeatable, and quietly wrong result, exactly the precision-versus-accuracy distinction covered at length in the third companion of this series.
Matching the Routine to the Installation
A single-day, temporary base needs little beyond a visual check at teardown. A semi-permanent installation running for weeks deserves a genuine periodic routine, checked on a schedule rather than only when something already seems wrong, since the entire value of monitoring lies in catching a problem before it propagates into every rover position collected in the meantime.
A semi-permanent base has been running unattended for three weeks with no reported errors. Does the absence of an error message mean the base is still sitting exactly where it was established? No. A physically shifted base can continue operating and reporting completely normally, which is exactly why periodic position checks matter more than error-free operation alone.
A base station can fail silently, through physical movement, gradual power degradation, or connectivity gaps, none of which necessarily produce a visible error. Periodic checks of its logged position, its broadcast content, and its physical condition, scaled to the installation's duration, are what actually catch these failures before they propagate.
Even a base later found to have drifted, or one that started with a modest coordinate, is not a lost cause. The next chapter covers exactly how much can still be salvaged after the fact.