Category Archives: Surveying

parrot mambo

Geospatial Holiday Gift Guide

Here’s what xyHt’s Located contributors want for the holidays and their suggestions for great geospatial gifts. Kevin Lidtka Wants a VR Booth For Christmas I would like a special booth that I can sit in. Inside will be VR glasses and a controller so I can walk or fly around my point clouds or 3D...

Photo female hands holding modern tablet and man touching screen.Businessmans crew working new investment project office.Using electronic devices. Graphics icons, stock exchanges interface.

Store-bought or Homegrown? Mentors for the Future

Try making your corporate leaders from scratch through training. THE TITLE OF THIS EPISTLE may lead you to think it really is “Gardening for Geomatics.” Instead, I discuss the concept of how employees are obtained today and mentors. In our society, there is a definite trend to homegrown over store-bought. For example, many people are...

Pennoni conducts night scanning operations on Route 1 outside Smyrna, Delaware to identify slab locations for a weigh-in-motion station.

Finding Flat Spots: Better Weighing (WIM) for Better Trucking

Laser scanning helps in building and troubleshooting weigh-in-motion stations for commercial trucks. With advances in automated traffic systems and improvements to traffic flows now common along many interstate highways, virtual weigh stations (also known as weigh-in-motion stations, or WIM) for commercial truck traffic are a logical development. This new type of station is an automated...

NATRF/NAPGD2022 HARN

Passive Survey Marks Get a “Stay” under the NSRS

My first order of business is to thank Dr. Dru Smith and the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) for their response to my “Are HARNs on Death Row?” article. When I wrote the piece, my objective was to increase awareness and incite action among the surveying community regarding the perpetuation of historical passive survey marks under...

UAVs are faster and safer for tasks like quantity meas- urement and verification; this point cloud image is of a coal pile for one of Anderson’s southwest Missouri power plant clients.

UAS 2.0

An upgrade to its UAV capability yields impressive results for a Missouri engineering firm performing UAV inspections. It’s been said that while good companies are satisfied with being good, great companies are continually focused on getting better. With that adage, it’s easy to see why Anderson Engineering (AE) has more than six decades of experience...

Visualization reveals a common error of using an incorrect point ID for a backsight. Technicians can correct the error while preserving integrity of the original measurements

Raising the Confidence Level

A surveyor’s most important deliverable emerges from detailed analysis and quality control. Recently, my four-year-old son grabbed my tape measure and began taking measurements of our living room. I asked if he wanted to be a surveyor like his dad, and he confirmed with a smile on his face. I played a small joke on...