I have some friends that are Electrical Utility Engineers. They hit me with a bomb shell today! What GIS GPS unit with a Camera would I recommend? Well it means less work for me, but I've got to help.
What would be a good unit?
Thanks,
Jules J.
A droid with GIS software installed. 🙂
LOL! Once LightSquared fires up that's what I'll be using!
They're looking for cheap. I'm telling them hard about the L1 only. But the Topcon GRS-1 would be their best bet. That ain't your $2,000 out the box unit. But what does and electrical engineer know about surveying or mapping? Even a caveman can do it!
I haven't seen a GPS unit with a camera, BUT we do have a camera with a built-in GPS function that can take digital photos with the Lat/Long labeled in the photo. You can also add descriptive text for the points being photographed.
It's a Ricoh Caplio 500SE with the GSE-609 WiFi & compass/GPS.
I would look at the Ashtech MobileMapper 100. This unit is capable of scaling the accuracy based on needs (from 50cm down to 1cm). The unit has an integrated 3MP digital camera and runs either Ashtech's own GIS data collection software called MobileMapper Field (very intuitive and easy-to-use and uses a Geoid model) or Esri ArcPad 10 software. Depending on where you are located you could easily obtain sub-foot to decimeter level accuracy if you have access to a real-time network.
If they do not need that type of accuracy, there is also the Ashtech MobileMapper 10 unit, which is capable of running the same software, but real-time accuracy is only 1-2 meters.
Shoot me an email if you have any specific questions or would like to discuss it further.
Brett
My email address is bblack@sidwellco.com.
Really you are looking at two different things. Once you have the GPS equipment to generate the position, any camera will do the rest. If the camera time stamp is sync'd with the GPS time, it is very very easy to associate a picture with a position.
Excel can do this for you.
With that said, something that does it all in the field would save office time processing the day's work.
We also have a few Caplio cameras, but now I use my I-phone. The caplio cameras are pretty cool in the fact that you can scan a barcode and insert that information into the EXIF data in the .jpg photo, then incorporate into a GIS database. You can use an external antenna. You can also translate between different languages by simply taking a picture of the words.
JRL
