Today was a day I planned to practice surveying with the Trimble R8. Brandon Olson, one of our PKAP staff members and a grad student at Penn State, drove over this morning. The only problem was that a small snow storm went though Indiana, PA early this morning and dropped about an inch of snow on everything. It was actually quite pretty shortly after dawn since the flakes were huge and made everything look like it was covered with cotton candy – does this make sense? Welcome to spring break in Indina, PA. Anyway, after Brandon arrived we spent some time going over the procedures for putting the tripods together, putting batteries in the units, and attaching the antennae. Once we finished this practice, we went outside and collected some data points. I planned on collecting a lot of points to use for practice with the Trimble software, but it started snowing and raining at the same time and it got cold in a hurry. So, we only took a few points to make sure the system was working.and broke down the equipment. The ironic thing was that by the afternoon the snow was gone, the sun came out, and it turned into a nice day. The old saying of "If you don’t like the weather in Pennsylvania, wait 10 minutes and it will change" is certainly true.
Later in the day I had a quick meeting with Bill Caraher in Second Life to talk about the software issues I have been having with converting the Trimble data to ArcGIS. We were not able to resolve the issue, but he had a couple of good ideas I need to follow up on.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 