The Texas Society of Professional Surveyors held its 62nd Annual Convention and Tech Expo at the Sheraton Arlington Hotel and Convention Center. More than 700 surveyors, venders, and guests attended the event. The exhibit hall was packed with a cross-section of new surveying technology and equipment. Numerous seminars were presented by nationally known speakers Gary...

The federal government shutdown as of Oct.1 is affecting many surveyors who rely on GPS/GNSS, but there are non-federal resources you can use in the meantime.  Below are lists of resources as well as explanations of the government’s role in providing data and access to data.  This information has been provided by PSM geodesy editor Dave Doyle;...

For an electric company in North Carolina, GNSS technology in the field boosts efficiency and brings new opportunities to the operations crews. High precision positioning is more available and affordable than ever, and one area of rapid adoption is in utilities: public, private, and cooperatives. Because of the economic challenges of the past six years,...

The surveying community is facing the most serious threat to its professional image in decades. The U.S. Department of Labor—without consultation with the community, public notice, or opportunity for public comment—issued an order on March 22 declaring that members of survey crews are “laborers and mechanics” subject to the controversial Davis-Bacon Act. Since then, I’ve...

I used to joke with my wife that when I died I wanted a geodetic marker set at my grave so that I could continue to be of service to my profession.  I reasoned that my friends would come to visit me, and it had the added benefit that I could keep an eye on...

There is a “mapping gap” that has been a challenge to effective asset inventory and management; a new product from Trimble, the Trimble MX2 Mobile Spatial Imagining System (click here for the press release), is the type of solution that may help greatly in filling that gap. Mobile mapping can collect huge amounts of high-precision...