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- Tuning Your turfRad Sensor: What It Is and How It Works

turfRad sensors are highly precise, but every golf course has unique soils, construction methods, and moisture-holding characteristics. Tuning ensures that the moisture values displayed in the turfRad Portal match the conditions you recognize on your course.

Colorbar Adjustment vs. Tuning

Before explaining tuning, it’s important to understand how it differs from adjusting the Moisture Color Bar in the turfRad Portal.

  • The moisture bar lets you adjust Minimum (dark red), Target (green), and Maximum (dark blue) values. This affects only how colors are displayed on the map to fit your preferred visual thresholds.
    It does not change the underlying moisture numbers.
    → Understanding the Settings of the Moisture Color Bar
  • Tuning adjusts the volumetric water content (%) values calculated by the sensor. It aligns the antenna model with your soil and turf conditions so the values match your reality.

What “Tuning” Means

Tuning is not fixing the sensor. It’s a simple adjustment that aligns the sensor’s internal model with:

  • your soil type
  • your construction methods (sand / native / blends)
  • your height of cut
  • your mounting setup (mower or UTV)
  • your typical moisture expectations

This makes turfRad’s moisture values reflect your real-world conditions more accurately.

Why "Tuning" Matters

Independent research on L-band radiometers (including turfRad) has shown that site-specific tuning significantly improves accuracy. Tuning ensures turfRad reflects your historical expectations, your typical moisture ranges, and how your team interprets moisture in daily operations.

How Tuning Is Done

  1. We look at a recent scan with you
  2. You provide qualitative feedback, such as:
    1. Do the values look higher, lower, or inline with your intuitive or theoretical expectations based on your current turf conditions? Some people may have calculated their permanent wilting point or field saturation moisture in % VWC based on soil texture and grass type, others may have a number in mind as "optimal", or a spot on the course that corresponds to this optimal condition.
    2. We don't require probe measurements or soil core samples, but if you regularly or historically have collected moisture meter measurements or weighed cores from your course, we can align turfRad with these. Electronic soil moisture probes have their inaccuracies (mineral content or salt in soil, bent tines, worn-down shortened tines, imperfect soil type settings), and turfRad measures fundamentally differently; larger soil volumes and is less impacted by small-scale variability in soil.
    3. Are there places that are noticeably wet or showing visible signs of stress? These qualitative observations can help us align the percentages reported by turfRad to be in line with typical numbers reflecting these conditions.

  3. We adjust the tuning parameters to better match your course.

  4. You run another scan to confirm everything looks correct.

 


If you’d like to request tuning or need more information, please contact our Customer Success team at dave.wilber@terraradtech.com or miranda.robinson@terraradtech.com.