Organisations that run their GIS on Esri collect a lot of data in the field: assets, inspections, environmental observations. Esri’s mobile apps put that data straight into ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise, where the office works with it the same day. We tested and confirmed that connection back in 2019, then with Collector for ArcGIS and the UNI-GR1, the receiver we sold at the time. Collector has since been replaced by ArcGIS Field Maps, Esri’s current field app, and today’s UNI-GR2 connects to it the same way.
The weak spot in any mobile data collection is the position itself. A phone or tablet gives you a rough position, which is fine for finding a site and useless for documenting exactly where a valve, cable or boundary marker sits.
How the ArcGIS data collector GNSS connection works
The fix is an external receiver. The Receptor GNSS UNI-GR2 connects to your Android or iOS device over Bluetooth and takes over as the location source for the Esri app. With RTK corrections, every feature you capture gets a centimetre-accurate position, instead of the rough position your device manages on its own.
The app also stores GNSS metadata with each feature: fix type, estimated accuracy, number of satellites. Your GIS coordinator can see afterwards exactly how reliable each measurement was, and filter out anything that did not have a proper fix.
A concrete example
A water utility maps its valves and hydrants during maintenance rounds. The field technician opens the map, walks to the valve, holds the pole-mounted UNI-GR2 over it and taps once. The feature lands in the utility’s ArcGIS environment to the centimetre, with the technician’s inspection notes attached. When a crew needs to find that valve again under leaves or snow, the stored position is good enough to put a shovel on it.
That accuracy is what turns a field app from a note-taking tool into a source your GIS can actually rely on.
One receiver, several GIS platforms
The UNI-GR2 is not tied to one ecosystem. The same receiver that feeds your Esri apps also works with QGIS as a surveying tool and with mapit GIS on Android. If your organisation runs mixed software, the hardware simply moves along.
Want to know what the ArcGIS data collector GNSS setup looks like for your organisation? Contact us and we will show you.