Saturday’s blog is showing up a bit late. Saturday was a bit hectic and I fell behind as usual. Anyway, for me Saturday was another GPS day, but a different type. I have been working with Bill to use the Trimble R8 to gather points for creating a highlly accurate map of our survey area. I played with the data we have collected in Surfer and it looks good. I would include an image of it, but I was trying out a demo version that has the save and export functions disabled. I need to see about purchasing a copy but am not sure if I have the neccessary funds currently available to me.
Anyway, on Saturday Matt Dalton and I went to the northernmost section of Vigla and laid out units (40 meters by 40 meters) that we will survey this week using our intensive survey methodology. It would have been very easy to use the R8 to lay out the points, the R8 was very busy gathering points on the slopes of Vigla. So we did it the old-fashioned way. We used laser range finders and compasses to lay out the squares. This is a bit time consuming since it involves a lot of checking and shooting distances and angles to different points.It took us about 3 and a half hours to lay out 21 grid squares. This will hopefully be enough units for 2 days of surveying, I will let you know. We also used the Trimble GeoXH to take GPS points on the the corners so that we could map them in ArcGIS. For me this was a new experience since we started using Trimble’s Terra-Synch to collect points. In addition to using a new program on the GeoXH, I have had to learn to use Trimble’s Pathfinder Office for downloading the points and differentially correcting them. It looks good so far.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 