There’s a proportional valve, so, that is working anywhere between fully open and fully closed.

Maximum pressure and minimum pressure. And that’s, on an AUTO8 system is is, operated by the computer itself.

The returns are an important little addition, and the idea of them is to dump the flow off any section which is switched off. To explain that a bit better, without these valves, when you turn off a section, the same amount of flow has to run through four sections. Turn off another one and you’d be running the same amount of flow through three sections. So of course the pressure climbs as you’re switching off sections.

With this calibrated return, if we switch off the number one left hand valve, the flow that those four nozzles were using, or however many you’ve got on the outer wing, that same amount of flow, when this is adjusted right, is dumped back to tank so that the, the flow is identical to whether when this is either on or off. And you switch keep switching these off, and and as long as they’re adjusted right, all of that flow there will be dumped back to tank, and so the pressure would remain constant. And which means this remaining section, which is spraying, would be applying the correct rate.

This electric pressure regulator, while it’s a standard regulator here, it has an addition which we’ve designed, to suit our system.

Inboard of here is a little, orifice fitting and they’re either fourteen millimeter diameter or sixteen millimeter, inside diameter that is.

And that diameter needs to match the valve. That’s important, if you’re ever replacing one. This brass section here is a check valve and we’ve had the odd, person come unstuck here where they fitted a new check valve, and they’ve fitted it upside down. So it’s got an arrow on it, which you can’t see on this particular one, but the arrow must point down so that the flow can escape. Flip that over a portion and no flow no bypass flow can, can escape from the regulator.

So this system here, being the auto rate system, it requires two inputs, to the computer to be able to, hit the target rate. It needs to know the flow that’s going out through the boom, and it needs to know the speed that the tractor is traveling so that it’s applying the correct amount of product per acre. So cover the flow meter first.

As I was saying before, it’s a Wolf flow meter, and it’s the paddle type.

And I’ll show you the paddle.

You can flick this little latch here and the plug comes off the back.

Undo the nut, and there we have the little impeller. So there’s your sensor, and there’s your impeller. The impeller, generates the pulses of the sensor, seen back through the wiring, into the cab computer.

This little dot here is actually an LED. So as soon as you switch your system on, that LED must glow orange.

And as soon as you get this pedal spinning, so therefore, when as soon as there’s flow going out to the boom, that little light LED will flick flick error.

And that tells you that the system is alive and generating pulses.

It’s calibrated, so that it knows that as the, when the paddle is is, moving at a certain speed, there’s x amount of flow going out to the boom. So it can send a message back to the computer, and, computer looks at the flow, and it looks at the speed speed it’s being told the tractor is doing and, it then knows, where this pressure regulator needs to be set to, adjust the pressure and therefore flow. We’ll pop that back together.

I should show you this before we go, that, this impeller can be removed from the sensor, but they caught a turn, like so. They can be washed in, dishwashing detergent and with warm water.

It should spin very freely, and you can see that when I spin that now, takes two or three seconds to stop.

If that’s binding, it will give a very incorrect reading, but we had very little trouble with those. The sensors, we’ve had the odd issue where it’s giving incorrect reading or has failed altogether.

When you pop this back in, you you’ll see these castellations here. Just make sure they lock in place, otherwise the, the paddle will be held partially out of the flow and give an incorrect reading. So when you’re popping it down, just make sure, like so, wind it down.

There it is there, when the nut’s fully tightened there should be no threads shown, and the sensor plug will be pointing directly out the back, pop that sensor plug back on, Very good. It’s gone. I’m just in the front.

Waterproof plug. So it just make sure there’s no moisture there.

Like so, that’s your flow meter.

So the Autorite system, requires your flow and speed. Now the speed message which is sent to the computer, can be done in four ways.

The simple and relatively old fashioned now, wheel sensor, which you can mount, in the back of a wheel to count or to, be triggered by the wheel nuts.

Nuts. Most people know those old things.

And there’s a plug on the a spare plug on the system here to connect the wheel sensor.

Second would be the speed antenna. So we have it up here, mounted on the galvanized pole. That is a speed only antenna.

It’s GPS type. And, it’s probably stays with your sprayer, so that it means that any of your tractors can pick up this sprayer and it’s a complete unit, ready to go. Just pop your monitor in the cab and you’re good to go. So speed antenna, the wire runs through and up, this is actually it there, and it runs and connects to a provided speed plate on the wiring room.

Next would be a radar cap, so a radar cable. If your tractor has the radar system, you can buy a radar cable to connect from your tractor, the plug in the cab, to the Bravo monitor, if you’re using the Bravo system. So it’s the third option. And then fourth would be a standalone GPS unit, like you can get the Raven Cruiser, the older model, or the newest, which is the CR7, and, you can get a speed message, a speed pulse out of that, and that needs to run back to the sprayer here and be connected to the speed plug in the same manner as a wheel sensor.

And the other speed, pulse supply would be a practice where you’ve got the onboard computer system, GPS system.

Most of them, I think, you can get a speed pulse out of them. It must be a square wave pulse.

And