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August, 2001 In Chicago, IL near O'Hare airport, a man was fatally injured in a rail yard while monitoring the shuffling of railcars. GPS-Mapping was phoned early on a Sunday morning to assist in providing topographic and accident reconstruction survey data. The biggest challenge was collecting data on a railcar in motion to create a digital "picture". Standard RTK GPS equipment couldn't collect data quickly to provide the resolution required. Finally, equipment was located that could produce measurements and collect data at a 10Hz rate (10 times per second). Several "runs" were made consisting of mounting a GPS on a railcar and pushing it down the track while collecting data. The result was data that accurately represented a profile of the track, horizontal movement of the railcar as well as acceleration/deceleration information.
July, 2001 July marks the starting point of a large golf course construction and mapping project. GPS-Mapping was contracted to provide complete mapping and construction staking services to Wadsworth Golf Construction (the largest golf course construction company in the world). Over the next six months, we will visit the Boulder City, NV site frequently to work closely with the site team. The 36-hole development is a City project. In addition to the new construction, GPS-Mapping was contracted to create an as-built survey of the existing 18-hole municipal course including 3,000 irrigation points.
June, 2001 NBC Sports used our animations extensively during the television broadcast of the US Open golf tournament June 14-17. Before Tiger Woods teed off on selected holes, NBC would run one of our animations illustrating the golf hole.
May, 2001 GPS-Mapping presented at the Annual Nebraska State GIS conference in Lincoln and followed up with a 3-day GPS/GIS workshop. This workshop was the first of its kind. We teamed up with GIS Workshop, Inc. of Lincoln to present a 3-day workshop comprising of 1.5 days of GPS and 1.5 days of ArcView. 24 industry professionals attended.
April, 2001
In the first part of April, we descended on Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, OK to map the course for NBC Sports. From our mapping/and surveying data, 3D computer animations were generated to be broadcast on national TV (which they were) during the US Open golf tournament. We mapped all 27 holes and did 5 of them intensively using RTK in order to generate realistic animations. We also mapped every tree on the property and recorded tree species.
March, 2001 A trip to Sarajevo, Bosnia highlighted this month's activities. The trip was sponsored by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). JICA made an in-kind donation of equipment to the Bosnian Mine Action Center (MAC) including dual frequency RTK GPS equipment for surveying minefields. We were dispatched to train folks at the MAC on how to use the RTK equipment. Their task is to identify, monitor and record surveys of minefields in Bosnia. There is estimated to be more than 1 million mines and unexploded ordinance still in the ground in Bosnia that lead to needless injury and fatalities of innocent men, women and children. GPS will help them record and contract organizations to help clear these hazards more efficiently so the residents may return to normal living conditions.
February, 2001 This month's highlight is not about a particular project that we did, but rather a discussion about how to bid on a topographic survey that wasn't well-suited for GPS work. The project was for a resort development on a peninsula in Acapulco, Mexico. The task presented was to estimate the time (and cost) it would take to survey the 500 acre peninsula and provide a one foot contour map. Normally, this is pretty straight-forward...but in this case the tree canopy cover was very thick and covered 80% of the peninsula! The client was presented a proposal from another company to use LiDAR, an emerging mapping technology using airborne laser to capture topographic data on a large scale very quickly. After talking to some folks in the LiDAR field, it was determined that LiDAR couldn't produce a one foot contour map given the thick tree canopy, but it certainly opened our eyes to the potential of this technology in the right conditions. In the end, we estimated we could do 20% of the survey using GPS, but the remainder would need to be done using traditional optical instruments (and a lot of people whacking weeds so we are not moving the instrument every ten minutes).
January, 2001 Interesting project of the month was surveying intersections where serious vehicle accidents had taken place and litigation was involved. It raised an interesting challenge...how to survey EOPs (edge of pavements) when there is two feet of frozen snow on the curb? The answer...use a really sharp-tipped rangepole and steel-toed boots. The other challenge, a little less time-consuming, was determining positions and elevations of the overhead traffic lights. The resulting data was used to create 3D animations.
December, 2000 More training workshops in Arizona this month. Mapped Stoneridge Country Club in Poway, CA to create a base map on which to design a new irrigation system to be staked in January using RTK.
November, 2000 The activity of the month was training. We conducted training workshops in Arizona, Kentucky and Missouri. All were two-day workshops focusing on resource-grade GPS mapping. However, most folks at the Kentucky workshop were interested in survey-grade GPS also so we spent quite a bit of time discussing RTK, static and fast-static...and we were fortunate enough to have brought our RTK system by chance so we set it up and topo'd part of the University courtyard!
October, 2000 The highlight of the month was a layout project in Chicago, IL. Nearly two city blocks of old, brick buildings (save a 90 year-old school that is still in use) were demolished to make way for a spacious park including baseball fields, winding sidewalks and beautiful landscaping. GPS-Mapping assisted in staking out the utilities, catch basins, manholes, sidewalks and curb/gutters.
September, 2000 Interesting project of the month. The fast-growing City of Killeen, TX is looking for a way to bring together geographic vector and raster data from different city departments and tie it down to real-world coordinates. GPS-Mapping spent a day mapping road intersections and discussing with the City how to use the data to translate/rotate their data to real-world coordinates (State Plane in this case). Also discussed and shared with them the use of DRG (Digital Raster Graphics), 1:24,000 USGS digital topo maps.
August, 2000 GPS-Mapping started the month mapping a golf course near beautiful Santa Barbara, CA. Using both RTK and DGPS, the data was collected in about a day and a half. Pin placements were developed based on the green contours created. New tee boxes were mapped and small re-designs were discussed based on the map created.
July, 2000 GPS-Mapping participated with the GPS team from Oregon State University for five days in July. Using dual frequency receivers, we occupied five known control points from 12 to 18 hours each. The purpose was to compare the results to measurements from past years to determine how much the land had moved. In all, the OSU GPS team recorded 110 points over a two week period, covering 2/3 of Oregon. For more information, please visit OSU's Marine Geology - Active Tectonics home page:
June, 2000
GPS-Mapping was selected by the Arizona Department of Transportation (DOT) to supply and support dual frequency RTK GPS equipment. In May, 2000, GPS-Mapping traveled to Phoenix, AZ to run a test course laid out by the Arizona DOT. The DOT invited four companies representing four different RTK GPS manufacturers. GPS-Mapping represented CMT using CMT's Z33 RTK GPS equipment. The DOT was particularly interested in obtaining accurate vertical measurements. The results were impressive. The DOT issued the following data: http://www.gps-mapping.com/cmtz33.htm May, 2000
The Department of Defense turns off Selective Availability...making autonomous GPS positions significantly more accurate than before. The largest benefactors are the users who purchased "consumer-grade" GPS units. This announcement didn't significantly affect mapping and survey grade users because to obtain mapping and survey grade accuracy, users still require differential or phase processing. Last Updated: November 1st, 1998 |
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