Category Archives: Professional Surveyor Archives
Feature: UAS and the FAA
What exactly is the current legal state of using UAS in the United States for surveyors versus hobbyists? What’s the big deal about the National Airspace System? What should surveyors do to prepare to use UAS? Few topics in the geospatial community are as fraught with misunderstanding and misinformation as the topic of unmanned aerial...
Feature: National Surveyors Week 2014
Collaboration among Pennsylvania surveyors exemplifies the spirit of the National Height Modernization campaign. The Pennsylvania Society of Land Surveyors (PSLS) recently launched a new initiative known as PSLS Reaching New Heights (PRNH). This initiative expands upon the National Geodetic Survey’s (NGS) GPS on Bench Marks Campaign (see sidebar at far right) and will be used...
Editor’s Desk: A New Magazine
Like so many ideas in surveying, this one started over a beer at a great little Irish pub with friends, where we discussed what the landscape of surveying might look like in the not-so-distant future. I figure, during the course of almost 50 years that I’ve been a geodetic surveyor, virtually all parts of our...
Conference Recap: Surveyors Take Notes at UAS
Soldiers in uniform, fully robed Middle Eastern sheiks, Hollywood producers, and even Morley Safer, reporting for CBS’s 60 Minutes, were among the 8,000 people who shopped for or just came to learn about unmanned vehicles (drones to common society) for use in the air, underwater, or on land at the biggest expo of its kind...
Where Theory Meets Practice: United States Standard Datum
This month we provide the history behind the theory and practice usually presented here by Dr. Charles Ghilani. This is an explanation of the first national horizontal datum used by the NGS (back then called the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey) in the late 1800s. In the 1970s when NGS created its database, the data developed on...
Feature: UAS & Accuracy
Field tests of UAS photogrammetry reveal verifiably superior results over traditional survey technologies. Editor’s note: Throughout the past year as PSM has been covering UAS, we’ve been looking for end-user evaluations of the accuracies that can be expected from these promising tools. A forward-thinking surveying firm in Cork, Ireland has done just that: in the...