MMCE adventure.
Monday using the MMCE we located several pins and traverse points in order to orient my previous traverse.
Started about 9am completed locations before 12 (jury duty at 1pm) Sent crew to another job.

Using the MMCE Tuesday we located about 6 Miles of River Bank and centerline. Started about 10am and was finished by 2pm. Bout sank the boat. It had a steady steam coming up tween my legs. Had to dump out water four times. Will the MMCE float? Is it waterproof? Sent crew back to other job to finish it. I went to office and transfered the data to acad. Plotted out lines I could use and prepared for tommorow.

Wednesday I sent crew out to locate a pin that was set by another surveyor on our South line. 4wheeler broke down half day job turned into 10 hrs. No pin found. I was very unclear as to exactly where the pin was supposed to be but the crew(jury duty again wasn't there) found lots of flaggin and a blased tree about 50' from where the MMCE go-to feature said it was. They located the tree with MMCE. They had traversed within 1000' of the point but was getting late. Still not confident of anything I had them find another pin on the survey to our south that was about 2 miles from the tree. Got the data in the office and rotated the previous survey, calculated new point to look for. Point came out winthin 4' of the tree they located.

Thursday we took MMCE and total station to look for pin. Using MMCE we looked all over but nothing. Traversed nearby and staked it out. Drug out pin finder and there it was about 6" down and 1.5' from calculated point. I really don't know why we didn't find it with the MMCE we were within about 5' (heavy hardwood canopy).

MMCE saved me at least one day and an additional 6000' of traversing thru river bottom by using it to locate the pin on the survey to the south. Firm price giver to client with my thinking we would possibly have to do this. Also saved at least 3 days of locating the river. Unit has already paid for itself.

Am now putting nodes on the property lines to see how good the MMCE will flag the lines. One line is pretty open and I expect good results but the other 2 are questionable. Will stake them all with total station and compare to what the MMCE gets.

I still have several questions about co-ordinate,lat,long display and file conversions and or merge in both the arcpad and acad. Will post these on the main board but for now have seemed to have worked some of my original problems.

Or . . . at least I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm very wrong.

In my county(as with the neighboring counties), we have really nice 1/3' to 1/2' pixel-resolution aerials.

You can actually see HYDRANTS.

I'm assuming that there's no real money to be made in a county that has really nice 1/3' pixel resolution aerial photos.

Please explain 1/3' and 1/2'pixels..

A hydrant as viewed from an aerial has a very small cross section. I have a hard enough time picking out manholes , which are a minimum of 24" in Lawton.

Deral Paulk, PLS

Manholes are usually a dark color.

Our Hydrants are usually painted a light color and contrast grass much better. Sometimes the top of a hydrant actually shows i=up in 4 or pixels.

Can hardly wait till carlson comes out with their sw for MMCE.
Puter acting strange today this should be in post below
Modified By Paul H Johnson on 2/10/2006 at 8:23 AM

No such animal around here John. I have downloaded a tiff file and scaled and rotated it but the best available (that I have found) are 99 images. May have even been older than that cause on this river there was a change in the channel in 94 that doesn't show on the image I downloaded.

A lot of times we can see pixel changes in our 6 inch imagery. But I may not know what it is. With a submeter, you can identify it in the field, and if you feel like the aerial is more accurate, move the point collected at the meter level in the field to the point on the aerial. There is a lot that can be done with an aerial though. The merger of GPS and digit aerial photography is incredible.

I was thinking more in terms of desktop in the office than in the field. We don't have anything that will display raster graphics in the field. But I'm sure the MMCE is slick for that purpose too.