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Tree positions more precise than a phone GPS gives you.

Four methods, lowest effort first: Refine, row-snap, your own RTK device, full drone mapping.

1. Phone GPS, honestly

A phone fix is typically 5–10 m; open sky is best, multipath off a barn wall or thick canopy makes it worse. For most of what you'll do in OrchardHQ that's fine — knowing which row a tree is in, attaching an observation to the right tree, marking out a block. The map is a working surface, not a survey. It stops being fine when you need a defensible boundary, sub-tree layout for a new planting, or pins that line up with an orthomosaic — the four methods below cover those cases, lowest effort first.

2. Refine — built in, free, the smallholder default

OrchardHQ's Refine flow turns a phone fix into something usable for individual trees. Tap to capture and the app takes a 15-sample weighted-average fix — stand still for a few seconds. Averaging cuts random scatter by roughly √n, so ±10 m drops to ±3–5 m with no extra hardware. It then drops you into the refinement screen: the marker sits on a zoomed-in satellite tile, you nudge it onto the tree's shadow or canopy. Two seconds of eyeballing closes the last few metres — good enough for two-tree-wide spacing, which means every observation, photo and task lands on the right tree.

Reach for it when: small orchard, each pin where the tree visually is, centimetre accuracy isn't the point.

3. Row snap — straighten a row in one tap

Promote a management unit to a row on the web. OrchardHQ measures the row's bearing and average spacing and caches them. Every tree in that row can then be snapped to lie evenly along the bearing — tap-drift, drift from an imported file, accumulated phone-GPS noise within a single row, all of it straightens out at once. Individual pins might still wander a metre or two, but the row reads correctly on the map and in row-level analytics.

Reach for it when: you have a rowed orchard and care more about uniformity within the row than absolute lat/lng. Lowest-effort precision win once your rows exist.

4. RTK — bring your own device

RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) is a correction stream that pushes a normal GNSS receiver from ~5 m down to ~1–2 cm in real time. In Ireland there's no free public correction network (the UK's OS Net is restricted, with no equivalent here), but commercial subscriptions cover the island, and many growers with surveying needs already have access through their organisation or a contractor.

OrchardHQ is plug-and-play with whatever device you bring — phone paired to an external Bluetooth GNSS rover, tablet with a hi-spec built-in receiver. The app uses whatever location your device reports; nothing to configure here, and your fix accuracy flows through to every pin.

Reach for it when: commercial precision matters (boundary survey, sub-row layout, trellis posts) and you have or can borrow an RTK device.

5. Drone mapping and custom aerial imagery

A low-altitude drone or surveyor flight gives you two things at once: every tree centroid identifiable from above, and a current canopy photo you can pin to the map as a base layer — the orchard looks like itself, not like generic satellite. It pairs well with imported data (GeoJSON, KML or CSV from a surveyor's report, planting plan or heritage register): every pin verifiable against the photo, missing trees obvious on the orthomosaic.

This isn't a built-in flow yet — get in touch for a quote. We're set up to do it in Ireland and can pair it with any custom data you already have.

Reach for it when: mapping an existing orchard from scratch (especially heritage), or you want a photographic record alongside the data layer.

Need precision support beyond what's described here? hello@orchardhq.app — we'd like to hear about it.

See it running on a real orchard.

Try the demo → Request access →