RTK GPS Technology

[DWalt]

I learned today about a relatively new measurement technology I was completely unaware of called Real Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK GPS). It greatly improves on all other surveying methods, including optical transits and satellite GPS. The main benefit is one person can use it, no survey crews needed. And its position precision is within one inch in all three axes (x, y, and z) anywhere on Earth. Regular satellite GPS location precision is on the order of several meters. A friend who is the technical manager at a local electric Co-Op told me about it, and the Co-Op is now using it for power line and substation projects. I can’t really explain exactly how it works, but there is considerable information about it on the internet. It always amazes me how far technology has come in the last 50 years.

 

[ditrina]

Yes...BUT will it help me find my keys??

Sorry I could not resist!!

 

[Ivan the Butcher]

I wonder how you display this kind of recission especially in degrees.

The USGS says one degree longitude is 288,200 feet in Central Ohio. One minute s 4800 feet divide by 60 = one second is 80 feet. That is 960 inches so the answer is roughly 1" = 1/1000 of a Second of long. (.001) I have seen map coordinates in 1/100 second before, so this isn't that much of a leap forward over a good man with a sextant and an accurate watch!

That one person can do it is the big leap forward!

Every time we refinanced any property we had to get a new survey. It was funny to watch the survey plat have the buildings of a complex wander around by as much at 10 feet from survey to survey. Hopefully this will put an end to this!

Ivan

 

[DWalt]

Just for fun, I looked up RTK equipment. It is not as expensive as I thought it would be, median price of equipment and software is approximately $10K, but some packages are up to $30K. For anyone needing to perform frequent accurate surveys, it seems like a no-brainer vs. calling out a survey crew.

I once had a spat with a particularly anal neighbor who claimed that my adjoining fence was over a foot onto his property. I finally had to hire a surveyor and found out the opposite. My fence was actually about a foot inside my own property line. He backed off after that. We were never on speaking terms.

 

[Ivan the Butcher]

I once had a spat with a particularly anal neighbor who claimed that my adjoining fence was over a foot onto his property. I finally had to hire a surveyor and found out the opposite.

As a kid, I remember nasty neighbors that dug up the survey pin and moved it two feet onto our lot, thereby making our house not compliant with required setbacks. When they complained to the City Engineer's Office, a survey crew came out measured everything, relocated the pin and sent the neighbors a bill!

Ivan

 

[bruce5781]

Just for fun, I looked up RTK equipment. It is not as expensive as I thought it would be, median price of equipment and software is approximately $10K, but some packages are up to $30K. For anyone needing to perform frequent accurate surveys, it seems like a no-brainer vs. calling out a survey crew.



I once had a spat with a particularly anal neighbor who claimed that my adjoining fence was over a foot onto his property. I finally had to hire a surveyor and found out the opposite. My fence was actually about a foot inside my own property line. He backed off after that. We were never on speaking terms.

It's a little bit more than that. Last fall, I purchased a quality, but median priced unit which was a demo at a Surveyor's convention. It was about 26K for the base and rover set-up. You can get one in the 10K range, but unless you are near a NOAA COORS reference station or pay for a local network subscription, you need two units. One to set up as a stationary base, and another to "rove" to the points you wish to measure. Then you need a tablet of some sort to run your software and take the readings from the rover. Then, if you wish to reduce that information and produce a finished plat of your project, you need another 3K to 5K in office software. Poles and tripods run another couple K.

Bruce
RPLS 5781

Sent from my SM-G781U1 using Tapatalk

 

[SMSgt]

I don't need no stinkin' GPS to tell me where I am. All I have to do is look at my feet. Where they are is where I am.

 

[Golddollar]

I learned today about a relatively new measurement technology I was completely unaware of called Real Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK GPS). It greatly improves on all other surveying methods, including optical transits and satellite GPS. The main benefit is one person can use it, no survey crews needed. And its position precision is within one inch in all three axes (x, y, and z) anywhere on Earth.

This is interesting to hear. I'll have to talk to some of my surveyor friends about it. I'm not a licensed surveyor, but because I did a lot of land title work and understood land measurements, including going back to links and chains, I was able to become an Associate Member of the Maryland Society of Surveyors. Because of my interest in land measurements, it has been insinuated that I was George Washington's rod man.

The Maryland Society of Surveyors and its PA counterpart are on a project to locate the survey markers and crownstones set by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to fix the border between PA and Maryland. Just think about how they did that work with transits and chains, and what the surveying technology has become.

 

[Rustyt1953]

I spent a summer working on a survey crew for Moore, Gardner and Associates in NC. It was very educational.

I learned all I needed to know about snakes, ticks and chiggers.

 

[DWalt]

George Washington was for some time a land surveyor in western Virginia. I doubt the equipment available at that time was very precise, but it apparently did the job. While I was not worthy of being called a surveyor, I did a little of it back in my much younger days, long before GPS when I was a partner in a timber venture in western Maryland. At least I knew the basics of how to use a transit and understood trigonometry. I owned a fairly good transit which I sold about 10 years ago because I had not used it in many years. I didn’t get very much for it as no one uses such obsolete things today.

 

[Rustyt1953]

Knowing how to spell and pronounce theodolite and viewing the world upside down got me hired.

 

[STCM(SW)]

Finding where you are on a ship somewhere on a sea trip is a good test of how good you are.....

 

[SMSgt]

I used a theodolite in the Air Force to calibrate the periscopic sextant test fixture. Mirrors and bubbles.