I just bought a new data collector, an FC336 with Magnet.I have decided to go this direction because of the cloud upload capacity of the Magnet and the fact that along with Magnet comes upgrades and keeps me current.
I also chose this particular DC because of the internal modem for network.

I'm pretty jazzed about the upgrade and should have it in my hands in a day or two.

The forecast of 2014 is looking very good and I will be upgrading my GPS and purchasing a robot as well.

Now as for office software. I am still agonizing on this one as I still despise AutoCad.

I have it narrowed down between Micro Survey and the new Topcon office.

Both will have a learning curve but to be honest right now I am leaning toward the Topcon due to fact that I can simply import from the cloud, I can have my desktop connected to the DC and the points will import as the field shots are taken and it looks very simple to use as is TopSurv.

I am really like the idea of using office and field software that are made by the same company.

As the next couple of months unfold I will tell you all about it and the directions I will be going.

Peace out surveyors. Make it a great and profitable week.

OK. I have raved for years about how I think GDAC is the greatest research tool I have ever seen.

I continue to say this today, however I found a problem.

The southwest corner of Section 4, Township 2 North, Range 4 East is noted on GDAC as an aluminum cap.

I have been to this corner several times and it has always been a 5/8" rebar with a smashed cap.

Big deal it checks and fits well with everything around it.

I have been working on a lot that the description commences on that corner then runs north 580 feet +/-. Actually every lot around there does the same thing.

Me being the diligent monkey that I am I shoot the section corner and go north 580 feet and what do I find? I find an aluminum cap stamped section corner.

Now here is my question:

What kind of crack was the crew chief smoking when he went to cap that rebar?

This person actually had to walk about a quarter of a mile and 200 vertical feet to cap a point that is no where near the proper location to which that cap belongs.

Now here is another kicker. That 580' point is called out on the GDAC interactive map and hits awesome for xyz.

Things like this are always a chuckle.

Thanks erroneous crew chief for the good belly laugh!!

This is honestly the first time I have ever found a real problem with any GDAC info.

Keep up the great work MCDOT.

Make it a great week surveyors.

Ever notice how you can shoot some monuments and so can 10 other people and they will all come up with different results?

I am of the opinion that it is impossible to take any measurement without a certain degree of error.

Remember the old days as an eyeman when you had that old crew breathing down your neck while you were rapping angles with the good old T2? There were times when I would rap 10 different sets because the mean closure was not good enough.

Fortunately I was honest. I used to be so good with these angles that I could give a false reading so the crew chief would move along. It's all simple math when you think about it.

Which brings me to the point of all of this.

Today's newbies have zero clue what it really means to measure. They will never know a chain for what it really is, they will most likely never rap angles and most likely never run 3 wire levels. Yes there are some exceptions depending on where they work and what they are doing.

So my questions is what will became of the basic fundamentals of survey measurements? 

Is the robot or total station more accurate than the GPS? I think absolutely in verticals. Horizontal who knows? I will tell you that I often use steady sticks with the gps, especially when obtaining control and I let it cook a little longer, at least 30 senconds.

There was a time in my life when all we did was run level loops all day long. Yes that's right youngsters loops.

The guy that I spoke about a couple of posts back Howie went to some on site welders and had them make these turn plates that were made of 3/8" steel with bolts in the top and those were the turn plates that we toted from station to station and then back again and again. They had 3 angled legs, were 6 inches tall and then the bolt and were about a foot by a foot and we would drop them and then stomp them in. They weight about 20 pounds each.

We ran some tight stuff and if we checked in over 5 thousandths we did it again. Why? I'm not sure.

I am wondering if the newbies know how to read a rod to the thousandth or if they even know to rock the rod? I'm sure some do.

When I was with Howie he made us use a calibrated deluxe rod bubble and only a 2 section wood rod.

I am wondering how many know how to run levels up and down hills and keep the turns balanced?
Simple. You and the rod man stay exactly 100 feet apart and parallel on the slope and work your way up and down.

Anyone pre 90's probably knows this.

I find it amazing that different companies can shoot the same section with the same character in monuments and come up with significant different results. Tenths, not hundreths. I actually think part of it may be an incorrect grid to ground scale factor. But who knows. It could just be a case of lazy head up ass.

So what is actually happening to measurements? Are they improving though technology or getting worse from button pushers that have zero idea of the basics?

It's a good question.

What say you??

Make it a great week surveyors.

I was on a job site Saturday morning and I got to talking with this mason that I have known for a bit. He is in my age bracket and we starting talking about the old days when everyone was not so sensitive, people settled things with fists, we could call each other names and ride the green horns hard and then drink beer together at the end of the day and all that real cool stuff of days gone by.

It was a great talk. It reminded me of all the Cowboys and Oldsters that schooled me and would not survive in today's work place.

Below is a story that I first posted in 2011. It's about a guy that used to ride me like a donkey, give me shit from sun up to sun down and then buy the beer. Enjoy.



This is about Howie.

I was thinking the other day about this guy, one of my first crew chiefs, he went by a certain name but when I found out his middle name was Howard I immediately dubbed him Howie. (He hated it).

Howie was a nasty son of a bitch.  He chewed Copenhagen, smoked generic cigarettes and drank coffee all day. At night it was a 6 pack of Old Style and the cheapest TV diner he could find. He was a connoisseur of prostitutes and had the clap 11 times that he knew of.

He would go to Saudi Arabia for 2 year stretches and sleep in the back of his Land Rover to avoid housing bills and then vacation in Thailand every 6 months, get baked out on Thai stick and bang hookers for 2 weeks, hence the clap so many times.

He carried a 270 behind the seat of the truck just in case he saw a wild burro. He would shoot them on site claiming that they would pull out stakes. (Note: This is true, I have had it happen and they set them neatly over a hill and crapped on the nails.) I suspect that he was part burro himself that’s why he hated them so much.

He avidly hated anyone that worked in the office and referred to them as “office pukes”, he had zero use for anyone wearing a white hard hat or white shirt and was convinced that anyone that wanted to work in an office had a vagina.

While he was all of this, he was an awesome field surveyor (only) and passed his LS the first time. (Early 70’s)
This nasty Mofo made me tough. I was already pretty tough and still am but he would go out of his way to make things very hard on me. He was an agitator. He would mess with your physical and mental status, he had a way of making a person continually question themselves, therefore I became a check freak. I still am.
He had a method to his madness and his training. Those with a weak mind or the PC pussies of today would have never made it with him. They would have quit and cried to mommy.  I actually witnessed people quit on the spot because of him.

Bottom line is that he made people good surveyors. That was his main goal with youngsters and he accomplished it well. He was a living breathing survey machine and he wanted to teach. He loved it, but only on his terms.

Today, he would be written up, fired, sued and have the book thrown at him.
But that won’t happen because one day he was on vacation with his mail order Philippine wife in an undisclosed location, he smiled at her and dropped dead from a massive heart attack. Death was quick for the old surveying donkey.

If you were on his good side he would treat you well after hours (I was), but on the job it was take no prisoners. If you were on his bad side you were total shit and he wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire.
Speaking of fire he had an eye-man burn one of his trucks to the ground. Imagine how the rest of the time those 2 spent together was. My question is: how the hell do you accidently torch a truck?? What goes through your brain before and during that??

I know a lot of you my age and older were brought up by similar guys of the older generation. I personally loved these old guys. They were tough and the work ethic was hardcore.

I would love to be able to send these new/young guys back in a time machine and give them 6 months of Howie. They would come back much better having done it.

So let’s all take a moment to remember the guys that trained us. Good, bad or ugly, we all learned a lot.
Because of them, I am who I am today, just a whole bunch more refined.

The GDAC program. As I have said many times it is the greatest tool we as surveyors have ever been given and it will continue to be for as long as I will be doing this job. That can be said for certain.

Since most of the published work was done several years ago there have been significant changes to the existing monuments due to varies conditions of construction, goofy people etc.

GDAC still remains the greatest tool for positional research and recovery but since things have changed so much especially in the city areas extreme caution needs to be upheld. 

I have been noticing a change in the monuments in character also horizontally and especially vertically. 

I use to jump all over them but now I have backed off and always check into another, especially when establishing elevation.

There have been instances when I have found monuments to still be in character but have changed vertically, once again due to construction or goofy people.

I have gotten into the habit of hitting those NGS points in the can before I go any further as a start point. Those have a tendency to stay accurate.

A program such as GDAC no matter how awesome it is can not survive accuracy with humans. Consistent updating would need to occur and the cost would be astronomical.

So the question is how does the inventory stay current? I am sure that there is a plan in place and I would like to know what it is.

Do we as the private surveyor need to report a change? 

I am curious to see how well the maintenance will go in the future. I am hopeful that it will continue to be updated and remain current.

Make it a great week surveyors.

I have spoken a lot about technology and the pros and cons of it as it is related to our business.

This last week I made the determination that I am behind the curve.

I was speaking with an equipment sales guy about the future of surveying and the advances that have happened and how because of the recession I have not made a purchase in 6 years except for small things, cables etc.

Looking at the newer stuff I can tell it is much improved and I am going to assume more accurate. Yes even GPS. I say this because the newer stuff hardly loses lock and locks much more quickly when it is fired up of floats.
The robots speak for themselves.

I have a theory that through technology the surveyor can start pushing the contractors to adopt machine control, the concrete guys can be trained to use robots and they all can be trained on software. They to are starting to be run by a younger forward thinking generation that is embracing it all.

I say it's about time.

Where is the surveyors part? A project will always need us but we can now step back from staking and let the liability rest where it always should. On the shoulder of the contractor.

The future is us teaching them how to use equipment and software and yes teaching them that they are the responsible ones. 

We are at a time when we will no longer be the first ones the finger gets pointed at.

That all said I now have a personal thing to talk about.

Saturday I said goodbye to my Blackberry and got a killer HTC phone.

My berry was 3.5 years old, dated and slow. I have to tell you that this HTC 4G phone is quite a shock with all of the functions and speed. Within an hour I was asking myself why haven't I gotten one of these sooner??

I think that we must progress with technology as surveyors. I know it can cause problems and brain dead newbees or does it?

I think the new people just think differently then us 20+ years guys. They think in solution and apps and we think in practical.

It's all part of the evolution of our biz.

Make it a great week surveyors!!

Anyone recognize this photo? Yes that's right it's Wild-Heerbrugg T2.

For anyone of my generation and older you will remember this or something very similar that was a huge part of your survey up bringing.

This particular instrument was used primarily for rapping angles. We used a T1 for construction because it was lighter, a little less accurate and it was easier to zero.

There were 2 kinds of T2 that I used, one with a single and the other with a double inverted vernier.

While using the T2 for control we never zeroed up. We would just site and go. Direct, reverse, horizon, then mean it out. We would do no less than 5 sets and then if one came in with more than a 3 second split we did 5 more.

In hind site this was some accurate stuff. Would would rap the angles, remove the instrument from the tribrac (if you had your head up your ass and loosened the tribrac you started again, once the tribrac was set it stayd until the legs were moved), then toss up a distance meter, calc and adjust the parts per million and proceed to shoot several distances. I have never used an attachable distance meter.

We would do this all day doing the longer distance stuff early to beat the heat blurr, jumping from set up to set up and at times standing there waiting for the chief to set a new site. (Lot's of pace circles around those instruments loaded with cigarette butts).

The point to all of this is we did some amazingly accurate stuff in those days without the awesome money making technology of today.

Here is an example of a combo of old and new.

A few years ago I was hired to do an asbuilt on a building in old town Scottsdale. The place was 2 stories with a basement and roof that needed done so a total of 4 floors. It was gutted and all of the floors were exposed and they needed to have floor heights, footprints and column locations run to the roof.

I started with gps, I broke down the block and set 2 control points across the street on the side walk. We then leveled though the control points, adjusted the vertical and set up a freshly calibrated total station and back site on the points.

I then went to the first 2 floors and and the roof and set 2 control points on each one. I then set a tripod with a prism and freshly calibrated tribrac on each point (moving between) and had my gunner rap and shoot each point both direct and reverse 10 times, starting direct, then a flop then back to the back site each time shooting a distance. We had to traverse into the basement from the street.

After all of that I reduced and meaned everything and had my control.

Now comes the part of developing footprints and locating metal vertical columns from the first floor to the roof, the basement had concrete poured around the metal all typical in size, the footprints were pretty typical.

I started on the first floor and what did I use?? Yes that's right a T2 and a chain and we turned angles to every column and chained the distance and wrote it all down in an actual field book. In this particular instance I zeroed the gun and then turned the angles to a constant corner on each column, sometimes multiple corners. Each one was treated as an individual.

After all was said and done I had a full building footprint and column asbuilt with .03' of error from basement to roof horizontally and .02' or vertical basement to roof, all of which I meaned and developed a really cool drawing file.

Could I have been more accurate? Absolutely. However my consensus was that kind of error though 4 floors basement to roof which the only place the columns were fully exposed were the first second floors was pretty damn good. By the way there was only .005' H&V between the first and second floors.

On a side note we took level shots at each column and footprint corner using a Chicago Rod. Amazingly those floors only had a 1/4 inch +/- float in them.

This was a tedious project and I had a lot of good people working for me at the time, however I did it myself and I grabbed an old school RLS who actually taught me a lot of stuff back in the days of old out of the office went and knocked the bitch out, mostly because he knew what we doing and the idea of having to teach some newbie as I went on this project made my head want to explode.

Today it would most likely be the laser scanner for this project. I would simply set the control and then turn them loose. It would be faster. As to being accurate I am unsure because I think people are still trying figure out the whole point cloud thing. That's just my opinion.

That was the last time I used a T2. Will I ever get to use one again? Who knows. I will tell you this. It was just like riding a bike, once you do it you can't lose it.

I am wondering if the newbies in the survey world even know how to use a plumb bob or hold a chain correctly so there tender little fingers don't get pinched or they get pulled off balance???

When I first started surveying we chained in everything. When we set a property corner we doubled our angles (how many remember that?), we would chain miles of curb and utilities, up hill, down hill, through curve deflections, through brushed line, it was quite a thing. We would then drop back and grade everything with a level. The funny thing is that a 3 man crew got it all done a lot faster and more acurate than the button pushing drones of modern day and we could visually see a bust and we all were running numbers in our heads always checking each other.

The plumb bob was the most important thing. Used for anything from its actual use, to a back scratcher, a hammer, a toy to punch holes in things (lots of broken tips), a paint can puncher explode and run device, something to stick in a power pole, a pry tool, a digger, an accidental foot poker, cactus remover, this list goes on.

Remember leaving it in the truck and the party chief reaming your ass for about an hour after you did a full bore wind sprint to get it??

Also remember the best way to get the broken tip out? Simply set it in the back of the truck out of the scabberd and it would work its way out.

As a lot of things the plumb bob is kind of a dead technology unless you are a good concrete guy or mason.

There is something that made a man tough when you had the ill tempered 225 pound crew chief leaning on the front of that chain yelling at you to hold steady.

As a skinny kid I learned real fast how to use my body as leverage and hold my own. I've always kind of had the gift of balance but that was a whole different thing.

I used to watch these big guys get pulled off of their feet because they thought chaining was all about strength. It rarely happend to me because I understand leverage.

While a thing of the past the plumb bob will always have a special place in my heart. It was like an appendage. You never left the truck without it.

I used mine on a site the other day. I found a monument that landed under a tree. I set 2 nails +/- 90 degrees from each other a 2 taped in the rebar which was in a hole. It hit pretty good. Within Board standards anyway.

This is a little blast from the past. I think a new surveyor should have to spend 6 months kicking old school in order to fully realize what they are doing. This process could eliminate a lot of future head up ass and that saying "well the data collector says it".

Well it's that time of the year when I have to fill out applications for E&O and GL renewals.

The good news is revenues are down for 2011 so the premiums will be a lot less. More good news is that I have gotten rid of a lot of equipment that is collecting dust and the price of replacements has dropped as well.

I did some checking and yes what I said is true. Equipment is a lot cheaper now. I was pleasantly surprised by this fact. So much so I got to drop the replacement cost &100,000.

This should be a great year for premiums which will make things easier while business picks back up. Next year will be a much different deal, but go 2012 rates.

I spend a lot of time trying to cut costs for my company. I search for better phone deals, better premiums, I find the best places for fuel (Scottsdale is not one). Essentially I cut cost wherever I can.

I recently renewed my plan with TMobile, by doing so I saved $125.00 on my monthly bill and ended up with a much better plan. I also switched my office lines to Vonage and clipped another $30.00 off of my bill. 

I am in the process of moving offices because the neighbors want to take over the entire upper floor and sign a 3 year lease. I found a spot that is bigger, $25.00 a month cheaper and I am month to month. How much better does that get? Did I mention closure to home therefore I will save on fuel.

All of these little things add up. At the end of the day it increases my bottom line and makes for a much happier surveyor.

Why should I spend my life working to pay someone else when I should be getting paid?

As the year progresses I intend to hire 2-3 employees. The forecast looks great and I am going to go for it.

The dilemma I am having is what kind of a package should I offer? Should I bring them in as employees or contract labor? The office people are absolutely contract, but the field people have to be employees because of workers comp issues. Do I offer the field people health insurance? That is a good question. Do I pay them less and insure or let them deal with it?

Employees in any business is the largest expense.

I am an employer that believes in paying for full benefits, contributing 6% to their 401k and giving large bonuses.

Business has become a lot different today and anyone that is a survivor will approach things with extreme caution.

I think when it comes to employees I will start very lean, see how things progress and then expand the benefits.

In a nut shell boys and girls 2012 is going to be a good year. I believe that a recovery in our profession is here. All of the bad employees have moved on, people are hiring and the cash is starting to flow. 

We all now have a chance to staff up with quality people and really crank out some good work. For the first time ever I can be choosy about the bodies and I intend to build a dream team of talent.