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LS verses guy with apple phone google earth and GPS app
true-corner replied 5 years, 9 months ago 21 Members · 29 Replies
The neighbors with their telephone APPS are calling my clients. My clients were well informed before I left the site.
I think one of the problems is the low opinion of Land Surveyors. Many still call and try to pay for survey services with a 12-pack of beer. There is a carry over from the days of Engineering firms who sent “engineers helpers” out to do land surveys. Those guys were “math surveyors” and had little to no experience with boundary determination, history, senior rights or prima facey evidence etc.
People tend to get upset when a local neighbor calls them. Right away the blame must be “that damn stupid surveyor”
They don’t even need to go to the county anymore for lat long.
The new app I been shown by landowners is onXHunt (www.onxmaps.com). It’s actually quite a cool app. Clients been using it to find corners or maybe corners. You get imagery, topo, ownership, boundaries. I think this is the way of the future. Its actually an app for hunting that shows you the ownership of the land you are on. Folks will pay many times for recreation what they will to locate their boundaries.
We all know that the boundary info is never going to be really good until a surveyor provides it. Known that for a long time. THAT costs money so probably never going to happen. They have everything else, technology, maps, all the meta data EXCEPT for accurate corner location. I doubt during the remaining career time I have left it will ever happen, NO MONEY back when, NO MONEY now and NO MONEY in the future.
I wish I knew. This article was written 4 years ago.
https://www.google.com/amp/gpsworld.com/rtk-on-a-smartphone-running-autocad-i-did-it-last-week/amp/
- Posted by: aliquotPosted by: JitterboogiePosted by: aliquot
The cell phone locations will probably catch up with survey grade GPS in the not to distant future. To me, the issue of imprecision is much less important than the issue of accuracy. I just explain to people that our legal system rarely recognizes coordinates as controlling the location of a boundary.
The days of needing to hire a land surveyor for their expert measuring abilities are numbered.
That time is about now. Centimeter accuracy is available for subscription to some services.
I think the lawyers have been pushing this.
But ultimately, just because a person takes even a Survey Grade Differential GPS out to “measure points”, does not make it legal, accurate, precise nor valid. I prefer total station to GPS for everything that needs to be super accurate and precise, and GPS is just a convenience, that I always have something to troubleshoot, recalculate, and adjust because it is GPS.
Let them eat cake……….
It doesn’t make it legal or accurate, but it takes minimal skills to be precise. As for valid, it depends on what the purpose of the measurements are. I don’t know how much longer requiring a license just to measure something should be required.
If our clients don’t understand the difference between a survey and measuring we are not doing a very good job explaining our product.
Aliquot hit the nail on the head in my opinion. We are not doing a good job of explaining our product.
I’m as guilty of it as anyone. I struggle to explain what I do because it isn’t a simple explanation and I lose the interest of most. I could explain what I do until I’m blue in the face, many of this younger generation think “there’s an app for that” so in their minds why do they need a surveyor in the 1st place….
thebionicman, nobody cares about accuracy until they care about accuracy, which is usually the time to call a lawyer.
Keep the phone handy.
Luckily where I work it’s rural/suburban/backward enough that nothing’s coordinated to that extent. I know it’s coming, but maybe I’ll be done by then.
I have seen people spend an entire years salary defending a 100′ triangle with a 3 inch base, but those are the exception.
In the 80s I had an owner try to pull one of the pipes I had just set. They had bought a 100 foot clothes line, folded in half and stretched it from the fence on one side to my pipe. He was getting his 50 feet. Nothing I could say was calming him. Then I had an idea.
I picked up the wrapper for the rope and sure enough ‘made in china’. When I showed him that we were no longer the object of his ire. We could hear him yelling about those blankety blank chinese until we left. The lawyers never made a dime.
These apps, gis maps and visaliners we contend with are no different than that guy with the rope. They use a tool woefully unsuited for the job. It’s up to us to educate them and keep things out of court. That is the most valuable skill I’ve picked up in this business.
- Posted by: Macheteman69
I could explain what I do until I’m blue in the face, many of this younger generation think “there’s an app for that” so in their minds why do they need a surveyor in the 1st place….
What you need to tell your clients is that you do corner identification. The measurements are used to evaluate evidence of where the corner is and in many cases there is conflicting evidence at the location of the corner. If all land surveyors do is expert measuring than you are going to lose your job to the GIS people…and the Apps.
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