All posts by Gavin Schrock

Credit Texas National Guard

Wind, Water, and Fire: Hurricane Response in the Geospatial Community

Response, recovery, and rebuilding in the aftermath of hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the unprecedented wildfire season in the West may be the largest combined U.S. disaster response to date. The impacts to Texas, Florida, the broader Gulf Coast region, and many western states will require large national and international effort. We are all involved;...

A demonstration scan of a London street; mobile lidar for above ground and GPR for below ground. Credit: Leica Geosystems (part of Hexagon).

GPR Revisited

Arrays of multiple sensors and advances in processing breathe new life into the field of ground penetrating radar. We continue to struggle with the opaque elements of our world. To be able to penetrate the opaqueness of night, fog, clouds, and the ocean’s depths is a relative snap compared to the challenges of seeing downward into...

Fire, Ice, and Latitude in Ecuador

A team of U.S. surveyors visited Ecuador to use real-time PPP to pay homage to the 18th-century “Geodesic Mission to the Equator,” one of the most difficult and significant missions in the history of surveying and geodesy.  Pictured above: The team of U.S. surveyors on the 2017 Ecuador visit (from back to front): Rich Leu, John...

Behind the Big Eye of the SX10: Trimble, Danderyd, Sweden

A visit to Trimble’s engineering and production center in Danderyd, Sweden, reveals the story of the SX10’s development. As surveyors, we purchase and use some of the most sophisticated instruments of any field-oriented profession. Such sophistication yields incredible precision, accuracy, reliability, and flexibility, and, as would be expected, can carry hefty price tags. With such...

Joining us on the test survey was Lennart Gimring, Survey and Mapping Manager for ÅF Infrastructure AB who was an early adopter of the SX10. Gimring reports that the rollout with his crews has been quite smooth. Photo by Petter Magnusson - PMAGI AB

The Unthinkable and the Thinkable

The following is the editorial for the July print issue of xyHt magazine: If we completely dismiss a notion as unthinkable, we might find ourselves ill prepared should the notion become an eventuality. This applies to how we might view the status of our professions and how we fit into the markets we serve. Is...

Gavin New

Point A to Point BIM

Our publication is all about how to get from (or measure between) point A to point B: the processes, tools, software, methods, and professional spatial judgments that go into these actions. Sometimes the road between A and B has a lot of twists and turns, and in the case of moving design and construction from...