Land Surveyor Community Forum

Replies

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  Khalil Haidary January 15, 2015 at 1:27pm

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  Muhammad Junaid January 1, 2015 at 4:44am

  Total Stations do not have any scale factor dude, its depend on your work area national grid sacale factor,ask to your national surveying agency about your area scale factor
• Student Surveyor

  Jansen Loi November 5, 2014 at 7:59am

  Will answer your qns the other way round to hopefully give you a better understanding. Cheers to the rest for some good explanations. May be wrong and please correct me if I am wrong. Am a student surveyor and sharing what I learnt!

  1. Scale Factor is the correction applied when you calculate what you measured against the projection/coordinate system you used. If Scale factor is not applied to your total station measurements. When you tie up your GPS control points via traversing, you will find that your traverse will not close well and have bad accuracy.

  2. In Large Scale Surveying, you definitely would like to apply scale factor correction to your measurements to ensure their accuracy.

    However in setting out works, the distances between your controls and stake out points would be short enough (hopefully it's short or you are gonna have problem with angular swings) that scale factor corrections are negligible.   
  • 

    Khalil Haidary > Jansen Loi November 16, 2014 at 12:25pm
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  Tim Salmon November 4, 2014 at 3:50pm

  How are you a surveyor when you don't know what scale factor is ??? - Here in England we use it on 90% of surveys. The use of a map projection always introduces distortions into your data in the form of scale factors, which make ground distances different from plotted distances. There are also small differences between grid directions and true directions. These distortions are inevitable when the curved surface of the earth is represented on a flat plane.
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  Chris Little November 4, 2014 at 3:42pm

  Scale factor becomes important when using national grid coordinates on a projection as opposed to plane coordinates on the horizontal plane. The errors in distance between distances measured a total station and those calculated from national grid coords will in with distance. There may also be an error in measured distances between coords from GPS using National coords as opposed to total station distances.