Working on a 70 acre boundary today...while the Loci were cooking away, I collected a waypoint at one property corner and using that position and information from our workmap,generated search coordinates in my HP-48 and loaded them into the 330.

Navigated to the corner locations...and found them...closest was 5 feet and the worst was 25 feet...this in the woods.

I was pleased.

This supported the technique that the Forest Service was suggesting for corner search at a GLO retracement seminar I attended in early October.

Tom Bryant PLS St Louis MO

Tom

You have discovered a "not so secrete" valuable secrete. This is one of the greatest advantages we found early on in the first round of ProMark2 beta testing last summer. You just described the method we use fairly well. Only difference I see is that we always do a WAAS corrected position on at least 2 of the project corners, then use a copy of the "work sketch" or deed coordinates to rotate to this bearing relation and SPC's. Then, as an added refinement, you can make rotation or minor translation adjustments to the data file as you go. Often we find the 3rd or 4th point we log actually improves the overall search network.

We've been taking it a bit further for the last few months as well. I never expected to have this much power available, but mixing re-con coordinates and 1 meter or 2.5 meter DOQQ panels to overlay your deed sketch is an amazing tool. We can download (free) 2.5 meter resolution DOQQ aerial photos and scale them (close enough for 2.5 meter stuff)into Cad, bring in the waypoint coordinates from the re-con, and "tweak" the deed sketch. We then have a fairly good view of how to proceed with GPS control, conventional traverse, etc. (We have just started purchasing the 1 meter DOQQ's on CD)

Some really amazing stuff out there, isn't there.

J.D.

Sounds great JD...

I am looking into buying some topos on CD...

Anyone have a preference?

I am looking at Delorme and Maptech...I know one company that uses Delorme and gets search point coordinates off of them...they claim it works great.

Cool cool cool all this technology we have available....

Tom

Tom, I've been using Terrain Navigator (formerly known as TopoScout and prior to that, known as G-REF) for about 5 years and I think they have a great product.

Shortly after getting my GPS equipment, I purchased DeLorme's TopoQuad product (to go with their XMap, Image Registration and Sat 10 products). I quickly returned the products for a number of reasons, but the bottom line on the TopoQuad product was that the images were quite poor when compared with the Maptech product.

Quality issues aside, Maptech has continued to offer free product updates ever since I bought their first product (G-Ref version 1.1). It meshes quite nicely with the ProMark2 too. And for $50, its a great investment.
Modified By Kelly Bellis on 10/23/2002 at 3:29 PM

Tom,
2 years ago, I purchased maptech(Arches and Canyonlands NPsin Utah) to go along with a gpsIII plus handheld for fun.
We did some winter hikes and found some interesting sites.
Also have used the on-screen map to mark waypoints in Central and South America that were very useful for recon.

Hopus all is wellus,

R


Modified By Robert Hill on 10/23/2002 at 5:55 PM

Guys.....

I'm not talking about topoquads, although we have the DeLorme maps for our small part of Texas (gotta buy 5-6 different packages to get all of Texas). The stuff I'm referring to is the Digital Ortho-rectified Quarter Quadrangles. Aerial photography (satellite imagery?) that is very scalable to insert into cad drawings as .tif images. Each panel covers 1/4 of a standard 7.5 minute quadrangle map. We can download the 2.5 meter resolution DOQQ's from a Texas state agency for free. We can also obtain the 1 meter resolution format, 4 DOQQ's per CD for $28/CD. The one meter maps are already scaled to NAD83SPC for us by the evil GIS people at our local Tax Appraisal District office. We do use quads occassionally in a layer in cad, but the aerial view of the project (even though it was flown in 1996) works wonders for project planning and design.

J.D.

JD
I checked the TNRIS web site and the 1 meter DOQQ are available for free download for Gregg Co.(at least the one I checked)