Category Archives: Surveying

Surveying and civil engineering technology students (left to right: Wyatt Spencer, Brandon Davis, Jeremy Brunell, B.J. Klenke, Jake Blue, and Joe Irey) plumb up the rod before taking a measurement of the shadow in order to recreate Eratosthenes’ method for calculating the circumference of the Earth.

Proving Ancient Measurement Methods

Surveying students calculate the Earth’s circumference by following Eratosthene’s method, with help from modern sources. As part of the Geodetic and Control Surveys class at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we have been studying the history of Eratosthenes and how he calculated the circumference of the Earth. As a class we decided to...

The new storage tank inspection tool in RealWorks

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...

Kirk Norton, NPS land surveyor for the AT, sets up a foresight in Pennsylvania with help from members of the Potomac Appalachian Trail club on the hill above him. Credit: Nicole Wooten.

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...

Warren Ward places a prism on an old pin.

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...

This Google Earth view of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, shows marks for the corners and standard parallels for the low-distortion projection.

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 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.

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...