Category Archives: GNSS/Location Tech

Encoding Geography: Scale Up to Keep Up

America’s foremost community of professional geographers wants all students, especially women and minorities, to have a head start in geocomputational abilities. A revolution in teaching geography is in the offing. Demand for professionals with geospatial skills is on the rise. In 2019, expertise in geospatial technology was listed by Upwork, a global job website, as...

xyHt Digital Magazine: December 2022

xyHt’s December issue tackles a hodgepodge of subjects, from the what’s going on in the ocean to satellites mapping from space.  As always, if you don’t have a subscription to our print edition, or if someone else in the office has snaffled your copy, don’t fret, here is the digital edition. Click here or on the cover...

UAS and ALTA Surveys

Part 3 Precision, accuracy, and completeness are the end goals of UAS post processing, but how you get there to meet ALTA standards requires extra care. In Parts One and Two of this article in the September and October 2022 issues of xyHt we looked at the time/cost/precision proposition of using UAS for elements of...

New Digital World Needs Data

Next-generation surveyors require specialized education and training to fill the role of geospatial data specialists. Many emerging geospatial applications, such as digital twins, 3D modeling, monitoring, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles, are based on big digital datasets. Building a 3D digital world starts with accurate data that ties to a point on the ground, so...

Sky High

UAVs deliver practical and highly technical mobile mapping Collecting imagery with uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is ideal for a variety of applications including topographic mapping, forestry ground and canopy measurements, powerline corridor mapping, Digital Terrain Model (DTM) generation, high-resolution digital imagery, and orthophoto production, along with support for a variety of other mapping needs.  Historically,...

Is High-Precision GNSS Coming to Your Smartphone?

We have seen over the past four decades how our traditional profession of making maps went from obscurity to mainstream to widely adopted, everyday reality. When I attended university for my geodesy degree in the early 80s everyone who had a car also had a road map in the glove compartment—from a basic road grid...