Category Archives: Surveying
Time to Do More
xyHt has been watching a recent flurry of news releases and webinar announcements from Trimble tagged with the slogan “Time to Do More.” There were quite a few major new products and enhancements announced so we wondered: Was this simply a marketing campaign? Or was this some new direction for Trimble? We decided to ask...
Mapping the Appalachian Trail
How the AT was created and surveyed, from Avery’s wheel to GPS The Appalachian Trail (AT) is very old, very long, and iconic. Completed in 1937, it stretches 2,189 miles through 14 states, 88 counties, 168 townships, eight national forests, six national parks, two national wildlife refuges, and more than 65 state game lands, wildlife...
The Right Right
Igor Kidinsky thought about another career for a fleeting moment. His cold fingers struggled to fine-tune the total station. As an Afghanistan war veteran, he sometimes dreamt of spending his life closer to a beach rather than continue freezing in the mountains. He would leave his crew-name of Eager (the Kid) behind and put his...
Transformation of Observations, Part 4
Single Project Factor Here concludes a four-part series of articles about transformation of observations, spanning from September and December 2014 to March 2015. Part 1 covers how to transform surface observations into a geocentric coordinate system so that they can be compared to GNSS baseline vectors. Part 2 is about how the creation of a...
RFID
Above: RFID tags take many forms. The inside of a tag shown above—designed to attach to metal infrastructure in harsh environments, such as water pipes and valves—has a thin copper “bow-tie” antenna with a minuscule chip in the middle. It’s shown contrasted with a grain of rice. An electronic handshake has brought together the worlds...
Mapping Peripheral
A review of Trimble’s R1, a GNSS Bluetooth peripheral for mobile devices, with multiple options for correction sources. The idea of a GNSS “puck” has broad appeal: a peripheral GNSS receiver to precision-enable mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, and a variety of purpose-built field-data-collection devices. There is a lot of functional territory between...
