RTN expert Gavin Schrock provides everything you need to know about network-corrected real-time GNSS observations.
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Software Review: Topocad 9 from Chaos Systems
Topocad from Chaos System comes to us from Sweden. In this day and age more and more municipalities are requesting some form of surveying and engineering work that can be incorporated into their local GIS, so having a program that... Read the Article
Software Review: Prefiniti from Center Line Services
Bob Stevenson, a well-known and respected New Mexico surveyor*, once told me that a surveyor could make good money doing lot and block surveys for title companies. I thought he was probably right, but at the time survey inspection reports, or whatever they are called in your area, were equivalent to ... Read the Article
Software Review: Adapx Digital Pen and Capturx for ArcGIS
It all started with Dick Tracy and his radio wrist watch. Now we have a pen that is a data collector. The Adapx digital pen is both Bluetooth-enabled and a USB device. The pen weighs just over an ounce and is about the size of an average ballpoint pen. Communication is either ... Read the Article
Software Review MicroSurvey CAD 2008
MicroSurvey CAD 2008 (MSCAD) represents the latest incarnation of their popular desktop drafting software. MSCAD is a fully integrated COGO and design suite developed for the IntelliCAD platform, specifically, IntelliCAD version 6.4. For those of you unfamiliar with... Read the Article
Software Review: General CADD
Backward compatibility has always been one of the things that make a good solid product. General CADD started out as an inexpensive CADD program working in DOS. Generic CADD was the name and it made it possible for surveyors who could not afford the very... Read the Article
Software Review: Carlson SurvNet Network Least Squares Adjustment Software
Many of today's surveyors began their careers with the chain and transit. As many of you will recall, even though electronic distance measuring technology had been around for a while, wide spread acceptance of EDM instruments did not occur until the late 1970s to early 1980s. The chain is simple, easy to ... Read the Article
Software Review: cvlTracker by cvlSoft, Inc.
There are two kinds of surveyors/engineers bosses and employees. If all you ever want to be is an employee, you can probably skip this review. However, if you ever want to open your own office or become the head of the organization you work for, then pay attention. Many states now require a fouryear degree for ... Read the Article
Software Review: Ez-Adjust
In Part One I discussed a small part of Ez-Adjust dealing with Four-Parameter Coordinate Transformation and compared it to other programs that offer analysis of the fit of two coordinate systems. Least-squares programs have two sides. The first is adjustment. The second is ... Read the Article
Software Review: Pythagoras Pro
Pythagoras is a beautiful CAD software program with maximum flexibility. Figure 1 shows the opening screen. You can work in just about any global or local coordinate system but you can always view the drawing coordinates and the drawing ... Read the Article
Software Review: ptbase by CBI Systems, Ltd.
For the past five years I have encouraged every software developer with which I have had contact to provide surveyors and engineers with a simple Geographic Information System (GIS). In this issue we'll take a look at a GIS called ptbase (pronounced "point base"), which comes from ... Read the Article
Software Review: Autodesk Civil 3D 2005
Autodesk has come out with a superior design package, Civil 3D 2005. How is it different from Land Desktop 2004? At first glance, not very. Of course they had to move the commands around just to annoy me but I admit that most changes were improvements. So, if you can do everything in ... Read the Article
Software Review: Manifold System
This review requires some background. My county has a Geographic Information System (GIS) parcel base. It delineates boundaries. Should it be under the control of a planner, a computer specialist, a geographer or a surveyor? I believe that this is the most important question that needs to be resolved in this ... Read the Article
Software Review: SiteComp Survey
It's a simple name for an extraordinary program. SiteComp Survey does all the things that surveyors do; it just does them better. It does not require any other program. First and most important is the fact that Survey is a point-based system. Every line or figure in the drawing is based on points in the ... Read the Article
Software Review: XMap, XMap/GIS Analyst, XMap/GIS Editor and GPS PostPro 2.0
XMap is DeLorme's basic mapping package, and it is a remarkable set of programs. XMap/GIS Analyst contains tools for GIS analysis and all of the functionality of XMap. XMap/GIS Editor contains ... Read the Article
Software Review: Geographic Calculator, 6.0
The Geographic Calculator, from Blue Marble Geographics, is the kind of utility program that allows the average surveyor to swim around in the geodetic pool without drowning. They might have called it the geodetic surveying calculator. I have been using the Geographic Calculator for many ... Read the Article
Editorial: America the Beautiful
After a rough wagon ride up to Pikes Peak in 1893, it was the view from the top that inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write a poem that became known as "America the Beautiful." Later set to music by Samuel Ward, its images have become part of our national conscience. Few there are who cannot sing at least one stanza of the four. It's no secret to .... Read the Article
Brass Caps and Bandanas—Monumenting Anaktuvuk Pass
The Inupiaq are Eskimo people that live along the Arctic Ocean coast of Alaska's North Slope. In the last few hundred years a nomadic splinter group of the Inupiaq known as the Nunamiut moved inland away from the coast to follow the Caribou migrations and settled at Chandler Lake and the Killik River in the .... Read the Article
GIS Mapping—Campus Style
When Craig Moore switched from the academic side of Virginia Tech in October 2004 to become an engineer for site development in the campus' Facilities Department, he inherited a GIS that was not easily updated, and maintaining it was a problem. As a result, "it trailed off to nothing," he said. At that time the system focused on ... Read the Article
Alleviating Poverty in the Developing World—Leveraging Property Rights with Geospatial Technology
According to renowned economist Hernando de Soto, the inability of persons worldwide to gain formal recognition of their real property rights is a major stumbling block to alleviating poverty. This lack of formal legal recognition of property rights is ... Read the Article
A Dividing Line Brings Us Together
Oh, the lines. The shortest distance between two points? A line pulled to ring a bell? A colonial boundary between two long forgotten counties? Lines of dialog in a television documentary? The lines marked of legal secession from an illegally seceded state? Soup lines during the depression? A line connecting a hook to .... Read the Article
Conference Review: Leica HDS 2009—Simplifying the Complicated
When GPS technology first began to filter into survey work, it was necessarily complex, depending, as it did, on satellites, atomic clocks, relativistic equations, and the like. Surveyors took this in stride and accepted that working with such arcane magic would always require expensive equipment, lengthy training, and endless hours of .... Read the Article
FeedBack
Clarification Regarding 2009 Manual: I found the article "Why a Federal Surveying Manual is Relevant to the States," by Steve Hansen intriguing [Sept. 2009]. I interpret the author to mean that the new manual soon to be published (2009) is binding on all recovery, restoration, and retracements of the Public Land Survey regardless of the date of ... Read the Comments
Vantage Point: Going Out with a Sigh
The story I'm about to relate took place over the space of seven months, and the outcome ratcheted up so much emotion that it was impossible to write at its last turning point. On October 1, 2009, the backhoes revved up their engines at 8 A.M. sharp, the earliest time allowed for such noise in my township, and La Ronda began falling to ... Read the Article
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A “Fixed” Fight: A peek inside one construction expert’s campaign to make fixed-price contracts and cost containment the industry’s new normal: Huge cost overruns and missed deadlines have long been the accepted norm for construction project operations. But as the economy struggles to fully recover, construction expert Barry LePatner stresses that these precepts can no longer define the nation’s most inefficient industry. He provides a proposal for hardwiring construction cost containment into future projects.
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