The kit receives positional corrections and can therefore obtain accuracies up to around 10mm in 2D position and 20mm in height. It is a very useful tool for management staff to check simple positions, depths, cut/fill heights and chainages without having to wait for surveyors who may be busy elsewhere. They can even be used to measure and calculate volumes in the field, and with only 10-15 minutes of training I have been able to show supervisors and engineers how to do this, saving me time and helping the project to run smoothly.
However, there is also a much more simple, ubiquitous tool that everybody carries around with them which can be used to obtain positions and locate features on site; the smartphone. As a surveyor, I am often searching for control points in the field and looking for the best place to set up my total station for a resection, at an optimum distance and angle from control. It struck me that since mobile phones have a GPS in them, I should be able to see points on the screen in relation to my current position. It was not hard to find an app which did just that. Enter MAPinr, a free app on Android phones (there is a similar one for iPhone) which can load a .kml file and display it on the screen. It instantly made the “looking for control points and deciding where to put the instrument” step in a survey much faster and more efficient.
This got me thinking what else I can locate using my phone. The accuracy of the phone, which might be 2-3m in 2D position, obviously precludes setting out with it, but for identifying areas or knowing the approximate location of features it is invaluable. On my last project I set it up on several of the engineers’ phones in order to identify chainage (to the nearest 10m), lot boundaries and culvert locations. The kml files can be produced in a CAD program and sent by email as an attachment, from where it is simple to load them into the app. They can be in the format of point and line data which is then displayed on the mobile phone, with a marker to indicate the phone’s position (identical to google maps). It gives project management staff the ability to orientate themselves onsite and check locations which they would otherwise need to call the surveyor for, and as such can be a very valuable tool to increase productivity.
