All posts by Gavin Schrock

Editor’s Desk: Already Here

Fait acompli – “it is done” You can hang a camera from a kite, or a balloon, or a radio-controlled aircraft, or a small private aircraft, or even a full-blown helicopter—this has been going on since the advent of cameras and these airborne platforms. Television and film production companies have been using small, radio-controlled helicopters,...

Feature: CERN

Surveying in support of sub-atomic research. “The actual state of our knowledge is always provisional and … there must be, beyond what is actually known, immense new regions to discover” – Louis de Broglie “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” (European Council for Nuclear Research), the celebrated research center in Geneva, Switzerland and home to...

Go Wide

While you were waiting for your legacy plotter to respond, wide-format output technology quietly evolved to provide substantial productivity gains and superior quality. When you consider the state of legacy plotters and printers, think about all the time, not to mention frustration, you’ve spent waiting for files to upload to plotters, lengthy plot cycles (especially for...

Feature: MATE

Marine Advanced Technology Education is creating the future of marine surveying and operations from groups of innovative kids working around kitchen tables.Does it seem like those youngsters in the increasingly popular robotics clubs are having a lot of fun? Yes, but they’re doing something else, too. The boom in robotics clubs, and especially underwater robotics, is...

GNSS

Above: The third satellite in IRNSS being tested before its successful launch. What Did Not Happen and Increases, Improvements, Innovations Sometimes the most telling precursors of the future are things that did not happen. By all accounts, 2014 should be remembered a horrible, terrible, very bad GNSS year with botched launches, toxic broadcast ephemerides, near peak...

NAVCEN

Take a tour of the real-time resource for civilian GPS. “Semper Paratus” (“Always Ready”) —United States Coast Guard Motto If you use GPS for surveying, you might have heard of NAVCEN. If not, then I highly recommend getting to know this valuable resource.  As a land surveyor, you are accustomed to having a fair amount of...