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

September articles posted

Editorial: Surveyors Get the Point
For me, the 6th annual ESRI Surveying and Engineering Summit represented a sea-change. While earlier meetings I attended were designed to attract surveyors into the world of GIS, the trend has taken hold and surveyors everywhere are busy incorporating GIS into their work flows. I like the way ....Read the Article

Point to Point: Can Retracements Be Confidential? Do your clients have a right to expect that the survey you conduct for them will be confidential? Let's assume for a moment that mandatory survey recording laws did not exist (and indeed, they do not exist in most areas) and that no other obligation to divulge the results of the ....Read the Article

WowFactor: TPC Desktop 2008 Global Background Clearing TPC Desktop 2008 is all about making it easier to work with your survey data and drawings. It's about doing less work and getting more done. Their new Global Background Clearing is a good example. We put a lot of information on drawings. Take a typical ALTA or site survey-- they can ... Read the Article

Wildfire Maps Keep Agency Missions Blazing Forward Blazing out of control wildfires have been sweeping across northern California this summer just as they did last fall in the southern region of the state and many times previously, leaving in their path death and destruction. These fires are ...Read the Article

Applanix: Solutions for Mobile Mapping and Positioning It's a given that Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) don't work everywhere, for example if the signals are sufficiently blocked by such things as tree canopy, or urban canyons. Because of the need to locate things everywhere, a great deal of ....Read the Article

RTN-101: Mapping (Part 14) Much of what surveyors do is essentially mapping, and much of mapping is/could/ would/should be characterized as surveying. But what certainly raises the blood pressure of many surveyors is when one puts the two terms in the same sentence, as I have just done. The debate over....Read the Article

The Marriage of GIS and Land Surveying (No Shotgun Needed) Too often the GIS professional and the surveyor are at odds; a hoity-toity GIS guy looks askance at a muddy-booted surveyor who wants to pin him down on accuracy and ...Read the Article

Software Review: I-Site Studio 3.0 and 4400 Laser Scanner It seems that every surveying magazine now overflows with stunning 3D images of everything from people, to cars, to historic landmarks, to infrastructure. Point clouds of intricate structures and shapes naturally captivate the geometrically adept mind. But what about the ...Read the Article

Product Review: SECO Poles and Prisms Tired of prism pole slippage and non-adjustable prism pole bubble levels? Tired of tilting prism target assemblies that slip as you are walking back to the instrument or having to lift the prism pole out of the bipod ring, or not being able to adjust the "spring" out of ...Read the Article

Vantage Point: If Not Now, When? June was a difficult month. A friend less than a year older than I am quickly succumbed to a resurgence of breast cancer. A colleague three years younger suddenly died of complications related to diabetes, although he had looked fine just a few months ago when I last saw him. Such events make ...Read the Article

Surveying `Da Situation: The Last Straw
It is bad enough that we've already had to endure months of election campaign rhetoric, but I read an article awhile back that was the last straw. I happened to be scanning the newspaper when I came across a piece reporting that the rock star Bruce Springsteen had ...Read the Article

August articles posted

Editorial: Machine Control Redux

I have received a fair amount of response to my July editorial about machine control. Responses included those who agree with me as to the inevitable impact it will have on the future of surveying and those who accuse me of selling out. Notwithstanding those states such as California that require a ....Read the Article

Point to Point: The Pincushion Dilemma Pincushion corners result when two or more markers exist identifying the same property corner. If set by surveyors, they are invariably the result of different interpretations of evidence, whether justified or not. The measurati have almost universally denounced them as further evidence of rank-and....Read the Article

The WowFactor: OfficeSync Drastic changes in the U.S. economy, including the recent runup in the price of gasoline, have had a direct effect on how firms use technology to remain competitive. Civil engineering and land surveying firms have had to make serious decisions, and time management is ... Read the Article

In Search of Monhegan's Letters Monhegan Plantation is an island ten miles off the coast in the Gulf of Maine. An artists' haven with a rich history in fishing, the island's average population of 75 residents explodes each summer with the opening of ...Read the Article

Towers of Power - Surveyors Locate Next Generation Transmission Lines As originally planned, the Eastern Plains Transmission Project, one of the country's largest power expansion projects in progress, is expected to ultimately deliver about 1,000 miles of ....Read the Article

A Visit to the South Carolina Geodetic Survey One of the hold-ups in the implementation of Real Time Networks (RTNs) for machine control has been the vertical accuracies. That being the case, when one of our writers, Joe Betit, told me that he had heard that the South Carolina ....Read the Article

In Memoriam: John E. Chance, 1924-2008 A legend within surveying circles along the Gulf of Mexico and in the petroleum and pipeline industries worldwide, John Chance died May 1, 2008 at his home in Lafayette, Louisiana. "Mr. John," as he was affectionately known by his friends, was born John Edward Chance on ...Read the Article

FeedBack More on the Schuylkill Center Wendy Lathrop's valuable article "Where There's a Will... " [Sept. 2007] couples the Orphans' Court activities of the Barnes Foundation and the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE). From a legal point of view the breaking of ...Read the Article

Software Review: General CADD Backward compatibility has always been one of the things that make a good solid product. General CADD started out as an inexpensive CADD program working in DOS. Generic CADD was the name and it made it possible for surveyors who could not afford the very...Read the Article

Survey Reports: Preparing a Survey Report - Part 4: FAQ This is the fourth 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]; and limitations of of the surveying ...Read the Article

Vantage Point: Water Over the Dam and Down the River What's old is new, and it's all wet. It may seem to be a "modern" approach to look beyond our own municipal boundaries to see what is happening on the other side of an invisible jurisdictional line that will affect flooding and stormwater on our side of that line. But awareness of ...Read the Article

The American Surveyor July articles

Editorial: Machine Control Electronic technology such as EDMs, total stations and data collection have radically transformed the way we work by reducing manpower requirements, enabling us to produce higher quality work in less time, and hopefully, increasing the profit margin. Technology has also made our work more ....Read the Article

Point to Point: Good Data, No Fences In his recent commentary "Good Data Make Good Fences," that appeared in Forbes online, Peter Huber argues that technology has progressed to the point of being able to trivialize finding property boundaries and other constraints on the use of property. Boundary locations have been....Read the Article

The WowFactor: Heads-up Rod Level by SECO In late 1999 the folks from SECO were clearing out some old imported auto-levels that had been a total disaster due to poor compensator design and manufacturing. But all was not lost. One of the cool features on the auto-level was a circular bubble that was viewed by looking straight into ... Read the Article

Stonehenge on Ice: The Story of Making a Frozen Replica The idea to build a full scale replica of Stonehenge in ice came at the convergence of two events in the middle of the hottest mid-summer July day in Fairbanks, Alaska. I was the chairman of the 41st annual Alaska Surveying ...Read the Article

Day of Reckoning: Fatal Flaws in America's Construction Industry Our wasteful construction industry has always been an expensive problem. But factor in a massive national deficit and the economic and safety threats caused by our aging ....Read the Article

Vantage Point: How "Hard" Must "Hardship" Be? Our governments, whether local, state, or federal, have a certain amount of say-so and control over our real estate. All three have the power to exercise their powers of eminent domain to condemn private property for public uses, providing that just compensation is paid to ....Read the Article

RTN­101: Mounts Count (Part 13) Reframing Reference Frameworks. There are few aspects of the subject of RTNs that are not in some way controversial; not uncharacteristic for new ideas. Before we look at mounting and monumentation options (and there are plenty of...Read the Article

Software Review: Adapx Digital Pen and Capturx for ArcGIS It all started with Dick Tracy and his radio wrist watch. Now we have a pen that is a data collector. The Adapx digital pen is both Bluetooth-enabled and a USB device. The pen weighs just over an ounce and is about the size of an average ballpoint pen. Communication is either ...Read the Article

Software Review MicroSurvey CAD 2008 MicroSurvey CAD 2008 (MSCAD) represents the latest incarnation of their popular desktop drafting software. MSCAD is a fully integrated COGO and design suite developed for the IntelliCAD platform, specifically, IntelliCAD version 6.4. For those of you unfamiliar with...Read the Article

FeedBack On Elevation Matters. I read, with interest, Wendy Lathrop's article "Insure and Regulate­Elevation Matters" [March 2008]. I agree that we, as professionals, need to advise clients about the technical aspects of developing in floodplains. That presumes we have an understanding of ...Read the Article

Surveyors Report: Doing the Right Thing
Everyone faces this dilemma: "Will I do the right thing, even if it will cost me something, or do the wrong thing, because it's easier or others do it?" When I was a teenager, my mom would ask, "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" Of course it depended on how ...Read the Article

The American Surveyor June articles

Editorial: Carlson Software: It's All About Providing Choice There are lots of reasons why I love my job, but one in particular is the macro view it provides of our industry as technology develops, and seeing it at trade shows and various user conferences. The down side, however, is that spending so much time on exhibit floors prevents me from...Read the Article

Point to Point: Our Niche of the Law In a trial with which I was recently involved, the judge interrupted one of the attorneys in his closing arguments by saying, "Wait a minute. Are you telling me that if someone uses my property without my permission for a length of time, I can lose that property?" It's fair to say that...Read the Article

The Receding Railroads By the mid 1920s the railroads in the United States had reached their peak with over 272,000 miles of trackage, not including double tracks, side tracks, or spur lines. The decline of the railroads began almost simultaneously with the advent and momentum gained by the ...Read the Article

Wow Factor: TDS Nomad Mobile communications are advancing all the time. What you want to know is, "How can they work for me?" Now there are mobile phones (well, actually mobile modems) capable of nearly broadband speed levels. Some of these modems come in the form of a USB device that can be...Read the Article

Conference Review: SPAR 2008 One of the overarching themes of SPAR 2008­and, indeed, of laser scanning in general­is that the existence of a carefully constructed virtual world will enhance our use and enjoyment of the actual world. Accurate 3D models facilitate...Read the Article

Flood Modeling with FEMA's HAZUS-MH MR3 Software Created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), HAZUS is a nationally applicable methodology for estimating potential damage, economic loss, and social impacts from disasters. In September 2007 FEMA released...Read the Article

Fresh Boundaries Bring Hope to Bugala Setting out for a ten-day field project, the minivan carrying twelve of us with our luggage and surveying equipment bumped along for two hours on narrow, dusty, rutted out roads. We were headed for the village of Bugala in the Nakaseke District of Uganda, located approximately...Read the Article

From Service Station to Reference Station Facing a steadily-growing workload of elevation certificates for Alabama homeowners looking to rebuild after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, officials at Polysurveying of Mobile decided that setting up the company's own Continually Operating Reference Station (CORS) could...Read the Article

Equipment Review: ProMark3 RTK from Magellan Professional The ProMark3 RTK is Magellan's latest precision, entry-level system, offering real-time kinematic power in a system that is substantially less expensive than dual-frequency RTK packages. The ProMark3 is a rugged Windows CE device (Fig. 1). Other than the operating system itself...Read the Article

Field Notes: Oh, What Crooked Footsteps We Follow According to the National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS), boundary surveyors "...compare and analyze all of the data gathered and reach a professional opinion as to the most probable location of the...Read the Article

Survey Reports: Preparing a Survey Report - Part 3 This is the third article in a series of articles suggesting formats and contents of a survey report. In the first article [Feb. 2008], I discussed reporting an opinion on the location of corners and boundaries. In the second article [Mar. 2008], I discussed how surveyors could...Read the Article

Vantage Point: Land Ethics
Boulder, Colorado—­home to Celestial Seasonings, the University of Colorado, the National Hazards Center, millionaires—­and possibly also land grabbers? I recently shared dinner with a colleague from Colorado, who alerted me to a case of modern day possible ethical lapses and...Read the Article