Category Archives: Surveying

What’s Your BHAG for 2020?

It just dawned on me: 2020 isn’t just a new year but the start of a new decade. Now is a perfect time to start planning for it. Let’s start with that cryptic headline: Just what the heck is a BHAG? A Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is a concept developed by acclaimed business researcher...

Hard Hat anniversary

A century later, the company that invented the hard hat is still saving lives through innovation, from the top down. It’s been a century since the hard hat’s invention, and the cumulative effect of the lifesaving creation is incalculable. The hard hat was born from an American soldier’s experience in World War I. While serving...

Surveying Degree Requirement: How Is That Working Out?

As we come to the end of another decade, I decided I would really stir it up for this edition of Field Notes. Sometimes you just have to whack the hornet’s nest, then take cover and see what happens. I am not a trained journalist. If I were, I would have done extensive research on...

What Is CHC Navigation?

One of the largest providers of surveying and geospatial solutions is a company you might have heard very little about. That is about to change. Above: Liao Kai (Leo), Ge Yang Chao, and the author test drive rovers on the CHCNAV roof. In September 2019, I visited the HQ of CHC Navigation (CHCNAV), a company...

MicroSurvey’s Ubiquity

The popular surveying software is evolving to support modern operating systems and dozens of field instrument platforms, and it’s making a lot of friends along the way. Some of the most ubiquitous and pervasive elements of our lives, like smart phones, the web, GPS, and even those omnipresent coffee chains, began as radical ideas. MicroSurvey’s...

4th Wave

In the context of the history of surveying and mapping, the evolution from analog to digital occurred only in the latter half of the 20th century. Since then there have been several distinct “waves” in the development of tools and solutions. This is true of both optical solutions and GNSS, but it’s a bit more...