Category Archives: Surveying
Crystal Ball: Housing 2019
If you pay any attention to the news you’ve probably heard the drumbeats of the “R” word: the possibility of a recession this year. Because of the ups and downs in the tech, automotive, and telecom sectors, you’re probably starting to get nervous. Then there’s the housing market, which seems to be stalling. Because housing...
GPR on a Drone
Above: From left – Jim Salazar, Mario Carnevale, Ken McBride, Myles Danforth, Alexey Dobrovolskiy (the author), and Janis Kuze. An international research team used new UAV and GPR technology to locate a lost U.S. airplane 300 feet below the ice in Greenland. On July 4, 2018, at Greenland’s Ice Cap, Jim Salazar and Ken McBride...
Silent Sentinels
An artist’s rendering of the south entrance portal of the Rotterdamsebaan tunnels under construction. Credit: BAM Infra. Monitoring Dutch tunnel construction under The Hague requires technology integration for tight tolerances. To address congestion in densely populated cities, transportation engineers and city planners are increasingly turning to tunnels. An example is the Rotterdamsebaan tunnel currently under...
xyHt Doer: Brennan O’Neill
Brennan O’Neill Hawaiian Pacific Branch Manager for Frontier Precision Frontier Precision has been in business since 1988, selling and supporting Trimble, Nikon, Zeb-Revo, and Spectra Precision hardware and software. One thing I get a kick out of at work is, after listening to the customer, showing them the exact thing they need to do their...
Coaching Robots
Continuous surveying (to support smart cities, infrastructure, geodesign, and construction) is opening expanded—but unconventional—roles for surveyors and geospatial practitioners. Photo above (added Nov 19th, 2019): A concept partnering Hilti, Trimble and Boston Dynamics on a walking platform, here shown with an X7 scanner (press release: prn.to/33XYbcJ). A member of your field crew that’s a bipedal, survey-rod-carrying...
State Plane Coordinates 2022
Ready or not, here they come. Considering all of the outreach that the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) has been doing for the last couple of years, hopefully most of you are well aware of the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS) Modernization Project. That project will result in the replacement of both the North American Datum...
