Land Surveyor Blogs

Long time since I have been on-line here. I salute LSU on growing a large base, and I have witnessed a growth in the content and number of members. This is a great all encomplassing surveying site. Have been working on a blog site, and a learning site that for land surveyors and GIS folks "who want to know about land surveying, GIS and people who I have been able to video. Lot's of short videos,interviews, tutorials, articles and papers on the historyl of Texas Land (Darrell Shine's collection)

There is a growing need for accurate land surveying data to be a fundamental requirement for government level geographic information systems. As an example for the USGS National flood inundation mapping science initiative a professional survey level data layer would be of great benefit to help determining exactly which structures in or out of the flood zones. Greetings my name is John W. Veatch. I am a land planner, a professional land development engineer, professional land surveyor, Florida Re

Following examples are calculated with BestTachySpot.

You may have experienced this before. You are defining a new station and all points with known coordinates are more or less in the same direction. Be careful in this situation.

The situation explained with an example: 

Resection on point 1 with observations to known backsight points on the road north of the site (green in following figure). Goal is to find the coordinates of point 5.

Accuracy (blue error ellipse in map):

Standard deviation is ver

Over 75 recipes to help you automate geoprocessing
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for ArcGIS with Python

In the spirit of welcoming the new year, we are liquidating many items from the store to make room for new stuff! My son  Justin has been helping me get the store in order and putting a fresh face on ePalmetto. As you can see in our recent post for January Survey equipment Liquidation, there are many items on sale that you might like to grab while you can..

Survey Equipment Inventory Sale

Here is a short list of equipment we are selling from the closet:
(3) B-1 Levels
(1)SDR33 Data Collector
(1)Sa

You Are the Missing Link

It’s All Greek to Me

At one time or another you may have heard the terms “surveyor,” or “land survey,” or “land surveying.”  You might have an idea of what a surveyor is–the most common image people imagine is of someone standing in the middle of a road, blocking traffic, with a funny looking “camera” on top of a large tripod.  To be certain, that person is a surveyor, and that funny “camera” is what is known as a Total Station.  A Total Station is a precision instrument used to measure angles a

Not that any of you are dummies, but these dummy books sure come in handy when you're in a pinch. Feel free to search them right here or download. Enjoy surveyors!

GPS for Dummies


GIS for Dummies

Check your network design with BestNetwork.

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Spread Sheet for vertical curve and Super Elevation Distribution Method for Surveyors

Total files 7 at bottom of post. Download them and enjoy the work

crestvc.xlsformula%20for%20vertical%20curve%2020%20m.xlsformula%20for%20vertical%20curve%2025%20m.xlsformula%20for%20vertical%20curve%28revised%29.xlsformula%20for%20vertical%20curve.xlsSuper%20elevation%20Hashmi.xlsSuperelevation%20distribution%20formula.xls

"If life were perfect, we would all paint, we would all play an instrument, we would all dance. But because we know that life isn’t always perfect, we have to have dance, we have to have music, to remind us how good life can be." – Suzanne Farrell

It seems reasonable to think that removing the huge pecan tree east of the ProFlex500 base station antenna would influence the OPUS results.  But my first OPUS report following removal of the tree was included in the current average NAD83(2011) position.  This remains a work in progress.  Over time there will be more OPUS sessions.  Each time I will decide whether to include it in the average or begin again.

The OPUS reports, raw data files, and more photos are available on my projects ftp site.

Professional Land Surveyors of the World UNITE!

As anticipated, the second annual International Surveyors Week begins now, once again uniting professional land surveyors on a global scale. During this week you will be accomplishing two important issues for land surveyors:

1) Educating the public regarding the importance of professional land surveyors to society and...

2) Cultivating a real global community for land surveyors to grow and thrive within. International Surveyors Week 2013 is an even

Finally an Adventure novel featuring a Land Surveyor and his son. Check it out at Amazon.com Barnes and Nobel. E-book is out now and paper copy coming in weeks. A sequel is in the works. See also tlacorte.wordpress.com and a big thank you to all in the surveying community for supporting the book so far. Nothing but great reviews for "6 Miles With Courage"

GPS  SURVEY

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based positioning system made up of a network of 24 satellites placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS satellites circle the earth twice a day in a very precise orbit and transmit signal information to earth. GPS receivers take this information and use triangulation to calculate the exact position of them. GPS receiver compares the time a signal was transmitted by a satellite with the time it was received. The time di