Volume 7, Number 2 Articles Posted

Editorial: Conference Season
Well, it's conference season again, and I'm sure many of you have or are attending your state shows. I'm very impressed with many of our state organizations for the work they do in promoting the profession and educating surveyors. The national shows, although costly, generally provide more than the state shows in the way of presentations, seminars and the latest technology and ....Read the Article

Surveyors In History Bryant Sturgess is a licensed surveyor and civil engineer in California. He was Chief Surveyor for the State Lands Commission under François (Bud) Uzes and Roy Minnick. Now retired after 38 years service he continues to the present as a water boundary consultant for the California State Lands Commission and the State ....Read the Article

GPS at LSU - A New Box for the Tigers Turning a golf course into a baseball stadium for one of the nation's most successful college teams presented a number of "interesting" challenges for my employer, Buquet & LeBlanc, Inc. of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The fact that the new stadium would replace a legendary ballpark that had been the site of the Louisiana State University Fighting Tigers' success for... Read the Article

Surveyors Convert, Connect & Expand to Create a Network of Possibilities Beginning in 1967, Van Harten Surveying (VHS) built a reputation in the City of Guelph, Ontario, Canada and surrounding communities for its ability to complete a wide range of engineering and surveying activities with speed and accuracy. The company's list of clients eventually grew to include builders, developers, lawyers, universities, utilities and government agencies. Yet...Read the Article

A Visit To Nedo When it comes to history, the picturesque town of Dornstetten has deep roots tracing back more than twelve hundred years. Translated "thorn places"or "thorn sites", its municipal crest bears a deer antler above a thorn bush. Located at the edge of the Black Forest in southwestern Germany, the town was first mentioned in public records in ....Read the Article

Students in the Pipeline Surveyors don't need advanced tools to see changes on the horizon for their industry. The general economic slowdown has meant challenging times today, but the future promises increased opportunities. The 2008­2009 edition of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook contained the prediction that "Overall employment of surveyors, cartographers ....Read the Article

Vantage Point: A Wish List for Risk MAP Map Modernization is dead, long live Risk MAP. So said a colleague while discussing the future of floodplain mapping in the United States. What he meant was that FEMA is finishing up its final year of Congressional funding for the Flood Map Modernization Program and has begun the transition toward its new Risk MAP (Mapping, Assessment, and Planning) strategy. While Map Mod tried to ...Read the Comments

Pointed Journeys
After driving until the road ends and then hiking for hours, you arrive at your goal. Are you atop a mountain peak, at a cave's entrance, or at a rare fossil dig? No, you're at a degree confluence point. There is no band, victory tape, not even a marker. You are likely to be standing in a field alongside some bored-looking cows. But you are on a unique spot­where a line of ...Read the Article

November/December articles posted

Guest Editorial: CGSIC Highlights
To state simply that the pool of GPS users has grown rapidly would be a gross understatement; more like a flood of biblical proportions. This flood is proving to be an epic challenge for the constellation providers to manage with regards to addressing needs and concerns of .... Read the Article

Eye In The Sky: A Visit to GeoEye Fom August 1960, when a capsule containing exposed film from the first classified military reconnaissance satellite was parachuted back to Earth, to present day 2009, when better than half-meter satellite imagery is available to .... Read the Article

Reconnaissance: Retracement Surveys and Undocumented Corners (Part 2 of 2) The original surveyor initiates the establishment of the corner and monuments it. In the case of a USPLSS corner, the acceptance of the deputy surveyor's plat locks in the corner. In the case of ... Read the Article

Vantage Point: "Scope Creep" and Other Illegal Activities There are days when it seems to be dangerous to be in business (although the alternatives are scary in a different way). We need to track our work in so many ways, including compliance with contractual arrangements and paying attention to the ultimate impact of our work. The Army ... Read the Article

10 Things I've Learned I recently retired from a medium sized engineering consulting firm. I had been with this firm for over 35 years. I started there when I graduated from the finest engineering school in the world, The University of Maryland, College Park. My career at this firm was a terrific experience. I made a .... Read the Article

Tennessee's Chimney I think it was Christmas you said rumor had it the surveyors were drunk on the Tennessee/Kentucky line around the land between the rivers. There's something I need to tell you. All across this great country, state lines are really, really .... Read the Article

Product Review: Altus APS-3 A few short years ago it appeared that the precision GPS equipment manufacturing market was going to be controlled by just three or four companies. Mergers, acquisitions and partnerships consolidated the market at a rapid pace, with no new companies entering the ... Read the Article

Model Behavior: The How-To Guide to Successful Surface Modeling, Part 3
Back for more? Welcome to the third installment in a series where we are discussing the exciting world of digital terrain modeling! As you have experienced in the marketplace, it is no longer enough to simply ... 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