Category Archives: Professional Surveyor Archives
Motor Sports: High Speed from High Precision
From the Gasoline Alley of Alberta, Canada to the famous Gasoline Alley of the Indianapolis 500, an ambitious surveyor has brought pioneering solutions in trackside scanning and metrology to the world of international motor sports. “A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds” —Sir Francis Bacon These 1,600-pound cars reach speeds upwards of 220...
Discussion of Senate Bill 804, SB 804
Editor’s Desk: Silent Sea Changes Two events in the past month are possibly among the most important things to happen to this community in a long time. Both have come almost unnoticed. On Friday, March 22, I learned that the governor of Virginia was on the verge of signing Senate Bill 804, SB 804...
Beyond the Scope: Business Is Still about Relationships
This is a bit of a different view through the scope than I usually proffer in this column. My normal article picks a business or communication issue and discusses ways to enhance performance in that area. But today, I bring to you a growing concern about individual communication skills.As the article title indicates, any business...
Where Theory Meets Practice: Determining Your State’s Next SPCS Zone
In the 1930s when the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), formerly the Coast and Geodetic Survey, created the first state plane coordinate system (SPCS), they limited the precision between a geodetic (ellipsoid) distance and the map distance to a precision of 1:10,000 or better by limiting the width of the zones. This resulted in many states with multiple...
Business Leader: 30 Years of Carlson Software
The three decades of Carlson Software have been marked by rapid growth, fierce independence in a very competitive market, and expansion worldwide into hardware as well as software. But just like founder and president Bruce Carlson, the company maintains that personal touch, with a direct customer service reputation that has built a loyal customer community. PSM correspondent...
Software Review: Moving from Land Desktop to AutoCAD Civil 3D
Now that Land Desktop has retired, many land surveyors and engineers are wondering where to go next with their design software. This is the second of a two-part series explaining how and why two AutoCAD Land Desktop experts made the decision to move in different directions. The case for Civil 3D is made here; the...