The Surveyor

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How about that? I'm a surveyor now! *well not really*

However, I was able to learning a little about this surveying and plotting tool and do some plotting of points.

The points I was documenting were of the bus training and testing courses critical to our bus operations and safety programs. The courses are preserved and laid out all year in a large parking lot using painted dots on the asphalt. Not a problem when the University has no plans to resurface the lot.

This is the summer, however, that the lot will get some needed attention, and when it does the dots go away.

So we spent the day plotting the location of all the painted dots.

Later we will set the points to a map and will be able after that to replicate all the points on the newly repaved parking lot, using the same surveying tool, exactly as before. The surveying tool has an accuracy of 2 centimeters, which is phenomenal. Normal GPS is 20 feet.

The pole is placed on the dot, then you tell the computer on it to read the geographical coordinates. The signal is transmitted to a satellite which locates the pole precisely. Then the data is stored in the computer on the pole, which is later uploaded to autoCAD or maps for printing.

Steve (pictured), a Civil Engineering student, and Zack, a CE graduate this May, helped me understand the process. It was fascinating.