American Surveyor Vol 8 No 2 Articles Posted

Editorial: The Things We Gather
You can tell a lot about people by the things they collect. Whatever the motivation, for most of us the process of collecting is a pleasurable pursuit. Many of our writers own fine collections--old surveying instruments, classic cars, antique clocks, coins, photographs and more. Personally, I've ....
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An Integrated Solution for Mining The Twangiza-Namoya gold belt in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is potentially one of the most exciting undeveloped gold deposits in the world today. Exploration and mining activities across what are today Banro's four ... Read the Article

What Separates the Rich from the Poor? "The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted." —James Madison. Of the 6 billion people on Earth, 2 billion try to survive on a few dollars a day. They don't businesses, or... Read the Article

Montana's GIS-Based Cadastre Layered with Riches As the fourth largest state in the United States, Montana is synonymous with frontier. Under the state's famous "big sky" are 145,552 square miles of sparsely populated open land, and-- ranked forty-fourth in total population and forty-eighth in ... Read the Article

Harnessing a GPS Network It's a powerful system, this SmartNet North America. Launched by Leica on March 1, 2010, SmartNet is a subscription-based service offering GNSS Network RTK corrections throughout North America. Geographically, SmartNet covers Ontario, Quebec ... Read the Article

Using Google Earth I'm sure many surveyors like myself have downloaded and played with Google Earth. I have virtual map pins stuck in places where I've lived and worked, and pins placed at Air Force bases where I was stationed in the United States, Europe and North Africa. There are pins in the ... Read the Article

Vantage Point: Life Behind Levees: an Overview and Update Throughout history, mankind's interaction with water has been a love/hate relationship. We have loved to be near water for drinking, bathing, fishing, watering crops, navigating our ships, and just plain aesthetics. On the other hand we have hated the unpredictability of water rising up out of .... Read the Article

Footsteps: Title Industry Changes Affect Surveying
Several changes have recently occurred in the land title industry. What caused these changes and what impact they have had on the boundary surveyor are the topics that this article will address. The land title industry is the group of companies that offer insurance to the purchaser of ...
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American Surveyor Vol 8 No 1 Articles Posted

Editorial: Good Records
Old photos and family albums tell stories that few of us ever take the time to put into words. My wife's family was fortunate to have several ancestors who were good writers. They left behind stories, rich in detail, describing their lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the struggles they faced ....
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Rainier—The Unforgiving Mountain Why has the Land Surveyors Association of Washington (LSAW) mounted repeated expedi tions to measure and remeasure Mount Rainier? Along with some very practical reasons--serving geosciences, geodesy, gravimetry, and public safety--this .... Read the Article

Using the Lynx Mobile Mapper to Survey a Levee In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, leaving in its wake an unprecedented loss of life and property damage. Among the critical infrastructure the storm impacted was the levee system that controls the .... Read the Article

GIS Matters: Convert CAD Data to GIS Surveyors have been using Computer Aided Drafting/Design (CAD) for decades to draft surveys and to do design. As society becomes more spatially conscious, the ability to integrate data with geographic information systems data increases and is now to the point where CAD-GIS ... Read the Article

Product Review: MicroSurvey CAD 2010 Ultimate "Good!" Step. Step. Step. Plumb the pole. Beep . . . beep . . . beep. "Good!" So goes the familiar rhythm of any one of a thousand topographic surveys on any given day. Each month, surveying magazines are filled with images of point clouds from laser scans. And each month the average practicing ... Read the Article

Conference Review: Moving Forward—2010 Leica Geosystems HDS Worldwide User Conference This year's Leica HDS User Conference once again raised the bar for return on investment in terrestrial 3D laser scanning conferences. With attendance approaching 300, up some ... Read the Article

Model Behavior: The How-To Guide to Successful Surface Modeling, Part 5 Welcome back! In my last article I stated that the next installment of this discussion would examine some field techniques to help create more accurate base models, but I will cover that topic at a later time .... Read the Article

Vantage Point: The Latest "Gate"
My township taxes will probably be going up, and maybe you can gain a business lesson from my pain. Call it "Webcam-gate". Many businesses have formal policies regarding personal activities on business time. This includes phone calls to friends, family, doctors' offices, and the bank. It also ...
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Vol 7 No 9 Articles Posted

Editorial: Winds of Change
The Windy City lived up to its name during a recent visit to Chicago where we attended a press event hosted by LizardTech, the leader in file compression. Those of you who deal with aerial images--for example, as backdrops for your land development maps--have undoubtedly encountered the company's popular multi-resolution seamless image database file format, MrSID, commonly pronounced ....Read the Article

CPS-98—An Odd Geodetic Survey Crew The following paragraph is found on page 9 of the official history of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in World War II: "To provide the additional staff needed, and to replace employees who joined the armed forces, many changes in personnel were made during the war. Since very few experienced persons were available for employment ....Read the Article

Laser Scanning Mushpot Cave The concept for this project was hatched in the brilliance-inducing state one achieves by moving rapidly between the dim, flickering ambiance of a GIS computer screen and the dim, flickering ambiance of a bat-filled lava tube cave, which were not dissimilar to the conditions in which I interned as a cartographic technician at the Lava Beds National ....Read the Article

Coping with Tectonic Motion Using GPS technology, surveyors can easily measure positional coordinates with centimeter-level accuracy. As a consequence of this capability, surveyors are now exposed to coordinates that change over time due to plate tectonics. In the contiguous United States (CONUS), the fastest changes in coordinates occur in California, because the state lies almost entirely within the boundary ... Read the Article

Rendezvous 2010 Recap Rendezvous, in the plural sense, are more than meetings--they are gatherings and collections of brand spanking new perspectives on ancient, old and archaic facts in surveying history. Over the past 14 years the Surveyors Historical Society has held memorable meetings in memorable settings, studying many varied and memorable ...Read the Article

Vantage Point: Crawlspaces and Basements Surveyors have been having trouble describing buildings for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) since time immemorial, or at least since the introduction of building diagrams to categorize general construction techniques. It seemed that every structure we encountered in the field fell between the cracks in terms of conforming to one or another of the proffered examples. The most recent ...Read the Article

Real Time GNSS Network in New Mexico Think RTK without a base station and you have a Real Time Network (RTN). No more shuffling through datasheets to find a nearby control point or doing recon for a station with unobstructed sky visibility and clear line of sight to the jobsite. No need to set up the unit in morning and tear it down in the evening. No more searching for an open frequency. Just get out of your vehicle and start surveying ....Read the Article

Surveyors Report: It Started at the Fair
On the opening day of the 2010 State Fair, the Missouri Society of Professional Surveyors started a Height Modernization Survey. This is a volunteer effort across the state with private surveyors donating their time and resources. Public surveyors from state and federal agencies also take part. We started the survey immediately following Governor Jay Nixon's official opening of the fair when he ...
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