August 2013 Archives

Editor’s Desk: Use H, Not Z

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This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series August 2013

During recent correspondence with a surveyor friend who was concerned about a positional difference he had observed at an old triangulation station, he sent me the following information: N = 213674.3282 m, E = 178633.4978 m, Z = 6.989 m.  Where the station is located is irrelevant.   This type of a coordinate description is […]

Feature: A New Datum

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This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series August 2013

Finally: the rationale for a new geometric geodetic reference frame to replace the North American Datum of 1983. In 2008, the NGS released the publication of a ten-year operating plan that, among other things, called for efforts to replace NAD 83 and NAVD 88, the official horizontal and vertical geodetic datums of the United States.  (Note […]

Feature: Making Lewis and Clark Proud

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This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series August 2013

Talk about a full arsenal of tools: this 80-year-old company provided all their services (plus an outside team of divers) to begin rehabilitating and replacing the Lewis and Clark Viaduct bridges in Kansas City, Kansas. It isn’t often that surveyors and mappers have an opportunity to apply a full arsenal of tools to complete a single […]

Around the Globe: Aleksey Korotya and Evgeniy Osadchiy Present Ramparts and Moats

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This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series August 2013

Editor’s Note: The following paper is focused on the surveying and mapping of archaeological sites, but also examines a dilemma that surveyors face in nearly all of their work; balancing the highest possible positional quality with affordability and practicality. In an adaptation of their academic paper, Aleksey Korotya and Evgeniy Osadchiy present how they evaluated and […]

Web Waypoints: Maps as Database Reports

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This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series August 2013

An interactive exercise merging the topo-graphical and the topo-logical.At the conclusion of the first article in this series (April 2013, “Databased Mapping”), I provided a web link for readers to respond to a brief list of questions about software they’ve used for surveying-related mapping purposes. Surprisingly, there were a statistically significant number of responses. Well, […]

Gigglebytes: I May Be Old, but at Least I’m Not Accurate

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This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series August 2013

In the last five to six years, we in the survey field have been … let’s see how to put this delicately … free of insect bites and ticks, warm and dry, depressed, and disgusted, and we have had to attempt creative ways to pay the bills. But, as the economy improves, hope has begun to […]