All posts by Gavin Schrock

Go Wide

While you were waiting for your legacy plotter to respond, wide-format output technology quietly evolved to provide substantial productivity gains and superior quality. When you consider the state of legacy plotters and printers, think about all the time, not to mention frustration, you’ve spent waiting for files to upload to plotters, lengthy plot cycles (especially for...

Feature: MATE

Marine Advanced Technology Education is creating the future of marine surveying and operations from groups of innovative kids working around kitchen tables.Does it seem like those youngsters in the increasingly popular robotics clubs are having a lot of fun? Yes, but they’re doing something else, too. The boom in robotics clubs, and especially underwater robotics, is...

GNSS

Above: The third satellite in IRNSS being tested before its successful launch. What Did Not Happen and Increases, Improvements, Innovations Sometimes the most telling precursors of the future are things that did not happen. By all accounts, 2014 should be remembered a horrible, terrible, very bad GNSS year with botched launches, toxic broadcast ephemerides, near peak...

NAVCEN

Take a tour of the real-time resource for civilian GPS. “Semper Paratus” (“Always Ready”) —United States Coast Guard Motto If you use GPS for surveying, you might have heard of NAVCEN. If not, then I highly recommend getting to know this valuable resource.  As a land surveyor, you are accustomed to having a fair amount of...

Hardware Review: V10, R10, RTX et al.

I was wondering when someone was going to do this: No base, no RTN, no cell, no bubble? No worries. Then throw in photogrammetry on the rod.  There were many noteworthy surveying technology announcements in the past year; several in particular spurred me into the mode of, “Okay, I gotta try that.” Trimble announced two...

Feature: Can You Hear the Shape of a Room?

Researchers at a school in Switzerland are working to solve a scientific conundrum that could lead to “sound” surveying and BIM solutions. There is a sort of scientific “sweet spot,” a window of discovery. It occurs when science turns a question into a potential solution to practical problems, even to problems that had been long...