Category Archives: GNSS/Location Tech

Instructors Brenda Densmore (far right) and Paul Rydlund (far left) bracket their students from a class held in Northborough, MA. Credit: USGS.

Surveying Scientists: The USGS Does It Right

As is often the case in our tightly networked profession, one thing leads to another. In early 2017 I was contacted by the US Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologist, Brenda Densmore, from the USGS Nebraska Water Science Center. Brenda had found me through the NGS State Geodetic Coordinator web page and reached out to me for...

Full Tilt

Beyond the electronic bubble: Integrating self-calibrating, magnetically immune tilt compensation in a high-precision GNSS rover. This is not just another rover with an electronic bubble and tilt compensation. This new technology represents a genuinely significant step in the evolution of GNSS rovers. We are presenting this look at—and inside—the Leica Geosystems’ GS18 T not as...

Getting out Is a Good Thing

Field Notes Although I have been active in the surveying profession in several ways over the years, including serving as the editor of Field Notes, I really haven’t ventured out much to seek face-to-face encounters in various venues and settings, but that recently changed a bit and has produced a new perspective for me. In...

OS 3D GIS Urban Canyon GNSS

Improving GNSS in the Urban Canyon

To prepare you for the this blog post, I wish to point out that I am a geospatial expert and can hold my own around the ins and outs of survey, so going to an event at the Ordnance Survey on “3D mapping for the improvement of GNSS in urban areas” was an eye-opener. You...

Radiant Earth

Connecting the global development community to Earth imagery and primary analytical tools. Nonprofits working on global development issues have had great difficulty acquiring and using a staple source of geospatial data in the form of Earth observation imagery collected by satellites. Anne Miglarese, the founder, and CEO of Radiant.Earth is working to change this. Miglarese...

Monitoring a Historic Bridge Replacement

A survey manager describes how monitoring improved construction processes for the replacement of an 85-year-old bridge connecting Illinois and Iowa. The Savanna-Sabula truss bridge added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, carried passengers along U.S. 52 and Illinois 64 over the Mississippi River, connecting the towns of Savanna, Illinois, and Sabula, Iowa....