For an electric company in North Carolina, GNSS technology in the field boosts efficiency and brings new opportunities to the operations crews. High precision positioning is more available and affordable than ever, and one area of rapid adoption is in utilities: public, private, and cooperatives. Because of the economic challenges of the past six years,...

The surveying community is facing the most serious threat to its professional image in decades. The U.S. Department of Labor—without consultation with the community, public notice, or opportunity for public comment—issued an order on March 22 declaring that members of survey crews are “laborers and mechanics” subject to the controversial Davis-Bacon Act. Since then, I’ve...

I used to joke with my wife that when I died I wanted a geodetic marker set at my grave so that I could continue to be of service to my profession.  I reasoned that my friends would come to visit me, and it had the added benefit that I could keep an eye on...

There is a “mapping gap” that has been a challenge to effective asset inventory and management; a new product from Trimble, the Trimble MX2 Mobile Spatial Imagining System (click here for the press release), is the type of solution that may help greatly in filling that gap. Mobile mapping can collect huge amounts of high-precision...

Amid a flood of UAS news, Gatewing announces a noteworthy addition to their fleet. It almost seems as if there is a new Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS)-related announcement every ten minutes. Trimble, that has already generated a lot of buzz over its Trimble Gatewing X100, announced a new entry to its product line on June...

Once again, the annual Spar International Conference, which was held at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs this year, lived up to all my expectations. Each year, I take a different person from my company, and each year, we both learn tons of new information. I say this every year, but if you are in the...