Hello NeilBlanchard, The array gets a few shadows early in the morning during a short part of late fall and early spring as well as some late in the day shadows during summer when it is awake until late. The panels are in groups of eight, and it takes only a little bit of shadow on the corner of one panel to knock out the whole group. If I were doing it again, I would look more seriously into panels that have individualized inverters attached to the panel so that each panel's reaction to shadows would not affect any other panel. In our situation, shadows are only present at the very beginning or end of the day, so the loss is quite minimal.
The tracker is based on real time, that is, it connects to a GPS satellite each morning to collect the time and date, and it continues to check throughout the day. We don't have snow here...well, once every ten years or so we might get an inch or two, but in general there's no snow. The tracker parks the panels at night in a near vertical position to limit the collection of dust from cars passing on the nearby gravel road. In the morning, each day's setting comes from a look-up table based on the date and time string from GPS and varies by season. mm
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