The March 2020 update to the Trimble Mobile Manager(TMM) app includes the ability to select an output GNSS reference frame that can be communicated over to other apps such as Collector for ArcGIS. This will affect many of our customers that are interested in or are currently using the Trimble RTX correction service with Esri apps. The RTX correction position is computed in an ITRF2014 current epoch. Field data collection apps are currently unable to do a datum transformation on the ITRF2014 current epoch which is a time dependent, 14 parameters transformation to a local coordinate systems such as NAD 1983 2011 which is a 7 parameter transformation.

In this video, I will demonstrate how to select the output GNSS reference frame in TMM and to setup a coinciding location profile in Collector to use with an RTX subscription. I used a R2 with CenterPoint RTX for this example.

Note– The TMM is currently available on Android device and will be released for iOS device in coming weeks. TMM will communicate directly with the current Collector for ArcGIS in places of GNSS Status. TMM will not communicate directly with TerraFlex.

For customers that have been using RTX with Collector before the TMM update, there is no transformation in ArcGIS to do a time dependent transformation. The NGS Horizontal Time Dependent Positioning(HTDP) website can be utilized to transform the data to a different coordinate system. In this video, I will demonstrate how to properly export your data to a file that can be processed in HTDP and recreate the geometry in ArcGIS Pro for proper alignment.

The GitHub collector Utilities toolbox used in this video can be downloaded from here and the NGS HTDP website is located here.

Note– The Trimble R1 and EM100 EMPOWER Module output the RTX correction as ITRF 2014 epoch 2005. This will be ~6 inches difference from NAD 1983 2011. If doing this workflow for those receivers, a date of 2005.0 will be entered into the HTDP for the reference date of the input position.

For more information on Trimble RTX subscriptions, please check out our RTX comparison, the Trimble RTX FAQs, or contact your Frontier sales rep.