October articles posted

Editorial: Setting Our Sights
Years of planning and construction went into Beijing's iconic bird's nest stadium that is now synonymous with 2008 games. With Vancouver slated to host the Winter Games in 2010, surveyors have been hard at work helping to ready the infrastructure. Diversifying: For those of you looking for ....Read the Article

Point to Point: Boundaries by Acquiescence We retracement surveyors, for the most part, labor within a stable and consistent part of the law. By this, I mean that from place to place, and over time, there is little variation in the doctrines defining correct practice. Monuments, everywhere, trump courses and distances, in the event of ....Read the Article

WowFactor: The Trimble VX Spatial Station It's not unusual to find a digital camera as standard equipment for a survey crew. Providing photos of monuments, project sites and other evidence is a routine part of the surveyor's work. Now­instead of a flat drawing and some simple snapshots­imagine giving your client a 3D walkthrough tour of ... Read the Article

Vancouver Trains For Olympic Games More than one million athletes, judges, volunteers and visitors are expected to converge on Vancouver, Canada, and surrounding areas during the 2010 Olympics. Yet many of these visitors won't realize the Olympic-sized engineering and ...Read the Article

Tips & Tricks: Getting More from Your Handheld GPS Unit Are you getting all that you can from your handheld unit? Are you able to directly observe State Plane coordinates with your handheld? Although inexpensive units may not have a selection for the State Plane coordinate grid that you use in your state, if your State Plane Coordinate Zone uses the ....Read the Article

Survey Reports: Preparing a Survey Report—Part 5 This is the fifth and last article in a series of articles suggesting formats and contents of a survey report. Previous articles dealt with opinions on the location of corners and boundaries [Feb. 2008]; encroachments, gaps and overlaps [Mar. 2008]; limitations of the surveying services [June 2008]; and....Read the Article

RTN­101: Monitoring with RTN (Part 15) Monitoring is essentially tracking movement over time and is often part of a surveyor's regular line of business. Such tasks are known by many names: subsidence monitoring, deflection monitoring, deformation monitoring, structural integrity monitoring, compliance monitoring, and ...Read the Article

Product Review: Spectra Precision FOCUS 10 The Spectra Precision's FOCUS 10 brings back a lot of memories from an instrument I reviewed several years ago. Without a doubt, the FOCUS 10 has benefited from the former, but is updated and less expensive even in terms of 2002 dollars. And that's a good thing, since ...Read the Article

ProFile: Marshall Robinson We allow little time in our day-to-day schedules to get to know people much beyond their shells. It was therefore a pleasant change of pace when I received a phone call awhile back from Marshall Robinson, who was calling to order a map from our website ...Read the Article

Vantage Point: Tough Times The construction slowdown has hit different parts of the country with varying ferocity. The latest jolt to "life as we know it" is a uniform blow to businesses of all sorts, and has the potential to change the financial plans of a number of surveying firms. Within a week, three U.S. motor vehicle ...Read the Article

Surveyors Report: Mimi the Elephant
Years ago I worked for a medium-sized private engineering firm in Denver. We negotiated a continuing services contract with the City and County of Denver for surveying services, and my crew was elected to conduct this work. The City was understaffed by one crew for ...Read the Article