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Lee D,
Found the second point. It was a solid 1′ off! ????You have found a control point and have a plan, yet you seem unable to orient same to what you find in the field. It might be better if you went back home and hired a competent surveyor. Nothing in surveying should ever be considered as fixed as it is all just a reference to help you find it today. From there it is your opinion. Stop looking for absolute solutions to every single problem.
I just got some deeds and filed maps last night. My PQ is 9?ø33′ off of an orthophoto I downloaded, but it was very simple to figure out where I start looking for evidence and I have no control point in hand yet. My second filed map has a different North base but I expect no problems there either.
Paul in PA
One of us is misunderstanding the other. “Using magnetic bearings”, is not the same thing as a, “magnetic bearing basis”. In all states that I have experience in, not just the metes and bounds states, it is still common when resurveying a boundary originally surveyed using magnetic bearings, to report the new bearings based on the record magnetic bearing of one line, sometimes surveyors will even rotate that line by the computed difference in the magnetic declination (I don’t understand why).
Although New York is not one of the states I have experience in, I would be shocked to hear that surveyors are still using magnetic bearings. In surveying there are three basic types of bearings, grid, magnetic, and geodetic. Grid bearings include state plane bearings derived from GPS observations, local grids built from some assumed north position, and local grids built from a current or record magnetic bearing. Grid bearings can be determined by measuring an angle between a line of unknown bearing and a line of known bearing (or by your RTK data collector using GPS vectors). Geodetic bearings are either measured directly (by astronomical observations or GPS vectors), or calculated with ellipsoidal geometry using measured angles and distances. Magnetic bearings are measured directly.
Because of habit learned before surveyors could access software, most surveyors choose grid over geodetic. Surveys using magnetic bearings went out of favor because it is extremely hard to measure magnetic bearings with the precision we expect in a reproducible way, and a precise magnetic survey will very rarely close on paper, because the local attraction on each line will be different.
Land owners still sometimes produce deeds on magnetic bearings, but as far as I can recall the most recent survey I have come across by a surveyor using magnetic bearings was from the 1970’s in Tennessee.
It sounds like in the case discussed above (or is it below?, the new format is confusing) the location of at least two corners are known. If that is the case, unless the 2001 surveyor actually used a magnetic compass, this discussion is purely philosophical. There should be no problem getting on what ever grid the 2001 surveyor utilized. What ever his basis of bearing statement was intended to mean can remain a mystery without adversely affecting the ability to retrace his boundary.
fascinating
amen
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