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Tree positions more precise than a phone GPS gives you.

Five methods, most precise first: drone mapping, your own RTK device, row-snap, Refine (measured distances), and a better phone-GPS fix.

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. Here are the methods that get you there — most precise first.

1. Drone mapping and custom aerial imagery

The most precise option, and one we run as consultancy work. A low-altitude drone or surveyor flight gives you two things at once: every tree centroid resolved from above to centimetre order, and a current canopy photo pinned 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.

No lock-in. You pay for the maps and the data, and you're free to export everything — the imagery and the tree layout — and take it elsewhere if OrchardHQ doesn't work out for you. That's the anti-lock-in promise applied to a paid service.

This isn't a built-in flow — 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.

2. 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.

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.

4. Refine — measure the distances between trees

Refine lets you fix a layout by hand: measure the real distances between a few trees — a tape, a measuring wheel, or paced steps — and enter them. OrchardHQ uses those measured distances to correct the spacing and produce a more accurate layout than any single phone fix can. It's the manual precision route: no hardware beyond a tape measure, and it works anywhere you can walk between trees.

Reach for it when: the rough spacing is off and you want to true it up with real measurements, without a drone or an RTK rig.

5. Phone GPS — a better fix as you add each tree

Even without any of the above, OrchardHQ squeezes more out of the phone fix when you add a tree. 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, and 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, so 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.

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.

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