All posts by Gavin Schrock
Motor Sports: High Speed from High Precision
From the Gasoline Alley of Alberta, Canada to the famous Gasoline Alley of the Indianapolis 500, an ambitious surveyor has brought pioneering solutions in trackside scanning and metrology to the world of international motor sports. “A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds” —Sir Francis Bacon These 1,600-pound cars reach speeds upwards of 220...
Erick Schonstedt: The Schonstedt Legacy
For 60 years, the life work of Erick Schonstedt has been shining though the company and its exemplary instrumentation produced for surveying, geosciences, space exploration, and humanitarian causes. “MAGNETISM, n. – Something acting upon a magnet. The definition is condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white...
RFID
Above: RFID tags take many forms. The inside of a tag shown above—designed to attach to metal infrastructure in harsh environments, such as water pipes and valves—has a thin copper “bow-tie” antenna with a minuscule chip in the middle. It’s shown contrasted with a grain of rice. An electronic handshake has brought together the worlds...
Mapping Peripheral
A review of Trimble’s R1, a GNSS Bluetooth peripheral for mobile devices, with multiple options for correction sources. The idea of a GNSS “puck” has broad appeal: a peripheral GNSS receiver to precision-enable mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, and a variety of purpose-built field-data-collection devices. There is a lot of functional territory between...
MultiStation: The Multi, the Mobile, and the Modeled
Leica Geosystems’ high-profile launch of the “MultiStation” is just part of the story of the potential for new products to significantly enrich workflows for surveyors. Three related developments in workflows caught our eye recently because they may serve as a harbinger of things to come in workflow optimization, from the activities of the individual in the...
Feature: Syntopic Exposure
UltraCam offers a unique approach to achieving high image dynamics. To name a product line “ultra” might seem pretentious, but in the case of Microsoft UltraCam, the moniker may be justified. During a recent visit to UltraCam in Graz Austria, I asked Alexander Wiechert, general manager of Microsoft’s UltraCam business unit, to explain the advantages...
