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Which Trimble Data Collector what type of work and why is it your choice.
350RocketMike replied 1 year, 9 months ago 20 Members · 49 Replies
@dave-karoly I am with you on the TSC3 being a bullet proof dc. Ours i use is one of the first releases. Its just in need of repair. I also have been frustrated with the bad updates lately from Trimble access is buggy and Trimble Business Center. They need to go through some agile/scrum training and figure out why it??s been so buggy. I don??t remember survey controller being as buggy. It had some issues and a quick fix was needed a few times for sure. Thank you for the info on TSC5. I will make sure I study on that before we make a purchase. Also the R12i. I have used 2 different systems with R12i for a couple days at a time testing. I did some time in motion studies using tilt vs non tilt on roadways. The tilt doesn??t seem like much time savings but it fooled me. It was a great time saver. I was very skeptical at first. I will be testing it more before I make my recommendations. I will be getting a javad system as well going to put it through the ringer. And they want me to test the carlson brx7. Currently they are a Trimble shop. I said if we are looking at making a overall change lets test them all for our work. If we are just wanting to upgrade a few really no need to reinvent the wheel just stick with Trimble. But the javad has their eyes. Work in canopy. I have used the r12i in to 500 plus feet into canopy and was actually surprised at how well it performed. I checked existing control and existing stakes . I staked lease limits 3.4 times more productive than a robot s6 in same area on existing control. I upped the topo to 15 seconds and a few extra epochs from default. Watched the sky plot and list manually enabled and disabled sats to my liking. Based on new gps block sats. Snr elevation and geometry. The largest error i had was in a hole 135 ft below base elevation and to a known control point. Was delta north .25 delta east .05 and delta elev .11. I also moved the base and re shot half of what I staked as a extra ck. All points were also shot from robot. I did not have imu enabled in canopy though recommended by Trimble rep. I am still concerned of using gps in trees and only relying on the h and v precisions and manufacturers fixes. But i am convinced with some proper established field procedures one can almost eliminate the robot in many situations . Its a tool just have to figure out just how to use it in a hostile environment. Oh and the test were done two different days and making sure of a 4 hour gap in time from one day to next so constellation was completely different on any given point and base being moved on same day with minimum of 1 hour gap to any point per rtk guidelines from ngs . Time is the biggest friend of gps/gnss measurement??s. On that note after about 1430 est. i see issues with GLONASS lately. I usually disable them from my solution at that time of day for a couple hours. Any of yall seeing anything like that. I am on east coast also.
Cool trick with 12i is you can check into the base with no issues.
????
Long live the TSC1.
SLOW but tough as nails and consistent.
@jitterboogie now i have not even thought of that lol. TSC1. Man I ran those things. I had a 4000ssi or sse on my back enough cables that i could lay the pack down and wade into the middle of a creek to get a rtk shot. They were tough and i know where one is that still works. No on the fly initialization when I first started. Cam corder batteries and small motor cycle batteries for rtk and ppk . At the base was a marine battery or 2 lol. I even remember the 4800. Batteries built into the rod integrated antenna and receiver. was the first one we had with OTF enabled. I thought i could map the world. Boy have things changed. Now we have more power ram and memory in our hands than our office computers back then. I even broke out my slide rule the other day to play around. It was given to me when i made i man. For quick calcs. By and old grumpy party chief. Now I have to take my shoes off to add and subtract.
@olemanriver the R12i is awesome except the tilt thing, I may see if I can disable the tilt function using the web interface. On a Topo shot it notifies right away, for whatever reason on an observed control point it lets you stand there for 3 minutes and tells you at the end, stupid if you ask me. And generally it is plumb, just the tilt meter is out of calibration AGAIN.
I??m not sure what??s going on with the restarting of the TSC5. It didn??t do it when new. Either a bad battery dropping voltage momentarily but I??ve noticed Access hangs and won??t respond, maybe me poking it pisses it off causing it to restart. Possibly if I was more patient it wouldn??t. We had a Leica P50 that does the same thing, have to be very careful about excessive touch screen touches when it??s in Leica pause. When controlling it with an iPad it isn??t an issue, only the onboard touch screen.sorry a lot of people I know love Android but it??s file explorer sucks. I have one TSC5 which refuses to recognize the usb flash drive until I restart it, the other one doesn??t do that but they can be slow. It??s a phone operating system, not ideal for a computing device.
TBC on the other hand is great, I have no issues with it but I??m pretty particular about work flow. So I haven??t had any issues with glitches.
it seems like everything we use has glitchiness, I??m a big Microsurvey fan but the new version fixed some things and broke others. Their help people are very helpful, they helped resolve the latest issue with a few setting changes.
@dave-karoly gotcha. So if you want to plumb the rod and not use the tilt imu. Just turn it off on access. I think click the receiver head and it will take you to a screen of options imu is one of them and you can turn it off there. There is also a setting I can??t remember where but i was having to recalibrate every 15 minutes. Or something crazy. So I started poking around and found where you can tell it how often you want it to recalibrate and tolerances. I have only used them a few days so I am no expert. We have a r10-1. And that darn e bubble and magnetic tilt thing drives the other crew chief nuts. He only uses it once every couple weeks and has to go through the calibration. But i read it??s supposed to be done like that. He is one of those that wants to turn something on push a button and it work the same always. He hates gps. Coordinates are coordinates. He cusses and fights it instead of reading and learning about it. Hopefully this helps you some. You have helped me I wrote down the issues you said you were having so I remember to watch for the issues when I began testing again. I just got out of some surgery Friday so have to take it easy for a few days. And I have hay to cut and sitting here in the house is driving me nuts lol. But some needed study time for PS exam has been accomplished. And I have been able to get on here and read a bit. I would be burning up my dealerships phone for support if i was having problems. I will try and read through a manual some tomorrow about the r12i tilt. I read parts of it before I tested the unit. But i have slept since then. So I forget. Working with GPS stuff is like a woman. You need to be patient and not go in to fast. Nice and easy and it will warm up properly. Stop poking lol. I beat my keyboard so i cant say much. I swear there is a gremlin on the number pad that moves the keys around often.
A write up on the results of testing the three GNSS systems would be much appreciated by all I’m sure if you can!
Android is just the platform, and in the original kernels awesome. Now it’s crap just like Windows and Mac, spun up to scurry our data away to all paying entities wanting it for their own uses.
Trimble releases horrible and at times disabling software updates and patches. It’s all part of their plan unfortunately. Hang in there, the next improvement patch is already being manipulated.
As for the IMU, you can go to the icon in the active job screen along the top bar and click on the base/Rover icon to disable, and depending on which ACCESS version a variety of different things you can do to tune or calibrate the e bubble or the IMU or both.
Good luck..
@smarbe2 I’m curios myself about the Origin software…I also use the 7 with Survey Pro…SP80s and a focus 35.
@lukenz I will try and put a little something together here. It??s mostly for the company and it is not the most scientific approach. I would love to have all 3 at one time and really set up a test. I am more focused on what procedures to ensure good results along with productive uses and practical for folks to use daily. But I will if and when I get all 3 tested. I imagine truthfully they all end up with about the same results. Just have to figure out how to use them properly. Of course we all can fall into the different bullet point traps of the marketing from each. And all the buzz words. Like ford vs chevy powerstroke vs cummins lol. Now its x amount of channels Processors pro point. Sure point. Lol. All 3 will have their own pros and cons. And if one is way out front the gap will close at some point.
@jitterboogie yes i am no IT guy at all but have worked on teams with programmers and those that study and understand all that very well. My question is. From my own personal experience is why has no one developed a UNIX based platform. When I was in the USMC and at the Agency. When it came to math and such and reliability UNIX always shined. Even doing GIS analysis same version of esri arc xxx. Was ran at the same exact time side by side on a windows and unix platform. Same data same commands. UNEX always was more reliable never had to re boot. And was quicker. Is it not able to be put on a small platform for a great data collector.
Droid is Linux kernel but it’s all in data sweeping and collection for packing and sharing it to the hoard.
Without all the crap should be awesome, we get what we are willing to accept unfortunately.
Unix is indeed the best OS, just takes slightly more effort to use and that in today’s world is unacceptable to most.
C’est la vie
@jitterboogie Yes we have become so use to everything being done for us not having to think just push this button and bam here is answer. No need to question it just know it is correct. Not me. I am so worried and seen software glitches that even had simple inverses wrong. So I still grab the old calculator and spot check a few things like inverse and calc elevation by taking za and slope dist rod and instrument heights long hand even in TBC just as a ck. I do a few random from the optical spreadsheet just to make sure I don??t have some gremlins in the software. I can??t remember but Trimble Survey controller version 11.20 or 11.21 somewhere close to that version had a issue on a basic equation that was not caught by to many. If I remember correctly when I reported it some others had as well and they had a fix almost overnight. I think it was doing a 180 on the azimuth or bearing to the backsight. So all the topo or side shots were out. I was not even running a total station much as I was doing mostly gps. But some company sent me a dc file because they were having issues. And they were on our vrs network. I thought great someone set control off network and has a multi-path issue . I finally said its not the gps and brought it into Terramodell and started checking set ups. And it showed up. Sometimes I just want to grab a field book and a T-3 and to heck with all the computer stuff. But reading the vernier and such i can no longer do very well.
those of you setting up base and rover. What are you using at the base. A survey tripod or the fixed height tripods for static type work. With 3 support legs and rod in the center. The neatest thing i saw was a tripod with a regular rover rod and sometype of adapter that hung off the side of tripod to support rod on the point. Very snazzy and quick.
@olemanriver and @jitterboogie
thanks for the tip on how to turn off the tilt function. I??ve been going into options and unchecking ??check tilt tolerance? and increasing the tolerance to 0.5?? but TBC still finds out like Mom finding out I stole some of the chocolate cake.
Overall I still like Trimble a lot, when the equipment works it??s great. TBC is vastly better than it was 5 years ago, I stopped using StarNet just because TBC has great data review and editing capabilities.
It appears to me that since the R10s RTK is just as good or better than Faststatic. I can get more observations across different times of day rather than fewer Faststatic sessions.
@dave-karoly well rtk has become the go to for control for most every day surveying outfits vs static or fast static. However, don??t lose site that many years ago the specs for static or fast static were depending by manufacturer between 5mm + 2 to 3ppm. So rtk is around 8mm +/- on the technical side. But on practical side I have found that even with gps only like a 5800 if i observed multiple times on our network with a 4 hour gap I was doing very well in accuracy related to the harn of 1993 back in Georgia years ago. Where i am now with better equipment on our network not as good but the spacing and density of the base stations are not as good. I usually now get on datum with network and use the power of relative accuracy from a base and rover. Much better relative accuracy than our network rtk can provide at this time. I also log data at rover on a test and send to OPUS it takes me no more time and is a sanity check. One of the test i want to run is use two base stations switching between them and both logging data. Go through opus project manager and compare to post processing in TBC. But just for fun. I have been trying my best to slow down my geodetic surveying brain some. As soon as I arrive on a new site to establish control my mind starts building a network and its not always needed on a smaller site. For what we need for Land Surveying work. I did an ALTA that we ran a traverse with traverse kit around 5 rounds force centering and double or triple shot all property corners from multiple control points. I performed a least squares in TBC and compared rtk positions at different times and did least squares on it as well. End results were so close that both could be correct. And this was on a site that rtk was not needed. One it was for my boss to see we could use rtk for alta and boundary surveys only at times. He is still old school compass rule guy. I also ran the alta relative precision report on both adjustments to compare. He is now getting somewhat comfortable with using rtk more and not just for setting a couple starting control points.
what we have to do is educate the crews to think when using gps and what all to pay attention to. So good results are capable. And when they are not. Like what to do when you have a couple corners 20 feet apart. And need to me alta specs. So i been testing a few methods. Used a steel tape between a couple fixed that distance in TBC and such. I am still learning TBC and have had no formal training yet. So we are doing the work twice as i learn how to properly use the software. I am still trying to figure out the beat weighting when we have rover pole prism pole and traverse kits all in the solution with rtk multiple shots and measuring rounds. In starnet you could really apply individual weights on observations. In tbc its more e of an overall approach to gps vs terrestrial. I have not figured out how to allow individual observations i know need a little more room to flex because of field conditions etc.
Standard tripod here for RTK base, those fixed rod style tripods I’ve never seen down this end of the world; given RTK base sits for a long time always wondered about thermal expansion with them.
I do use a rotating plummet under the base though as can confirm on the spot if tribrach/plummet in adjustment and if not easy to slide half way between in the field and then sort out adjustment when back on office vs fixed plummet in tribrach which you don’t know if it’s pointing off without doing the adjustment checks.
- Posted by: @olemanriver
In starnet you could really apply individual weights on observations. In tbc its more e of an overall approach to gps vs terrestrial. I have not figured out how to allow individual observations i know need a little more room to flex because of field conditions etc.
We have both TBC and StarNet.
One of my fellow tech nerds in the firm has a saying: The latter is great in two instances: one does not know how to use TBC at all, and when one needs to perform brain surgery with raw observations – when you really, really need to weight those observations individually.
Deformation monitoring might require it every now and then, but that’s a highly specialized niche…just like brain surgery. Very few people NEED to do brain surgery, just like very few people NEED to free-form weights on every adjustment.
The question I always ask folks who are looking to free-form observation weights is: should you? Is there an overriding reason to do so, or are you really just looking to whip an outlier observation back into line i.e., force its standardized residual to fall within tolerance?
If you don’t know the difference between the two, Starnet is not a necessity and you probably shouldn’t be doing adjustments period.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman - Posted by: @rover83
We have both TBC and StarNet…. The latter is great in two instances:
Your nerd is forgetting a third: when any part of the raw data is not in Trimble format. One of the major strengths of StarNet is it’s ability to combine data from various makers.
As for the second, I rarely apply custom weightings to individual observations in StarNet.
@rover83 i agree. Its when i have those instances where i know a certain observation by knowledge and experience due to terrain or obstruction or other things going on I want to allow it to float not make it look better than what it was. For instance if i chain/ measure from a couple points with steel tape or 25?? pocket tape to position a corner from say a robot position points or even rtk position points i have not yet convinced myself that TBC is doing that as well. I may be wrong it might be handling it fine . But since I cannot so far with my limited experience with TBC make sure i am getting the true relative precision tolerance as per ALTA requirements.
now i am not sweating it a whole lot but from years ago with starnet I remember chaining in corners from using a plumb bob string and setting a few nails on that line to locate and my old boss saying sometimes you need to go check that see how the residuals look you may have busted a measurement etc. TBC is almost to easy it kinda scares me lol. I used adjust and other similar programs at the agency and USMC that i had to really dive into every thing. Where TBC kinda just click and go. My brain is not wired to click a button and just go. And if i can chain in a few points quicker than moving a robot and setting another point i would rather do that. Now most of the people i work with would just keep setting fly points as they call them and call it good. Me i like to close things out right or wrong. Not necessarily a traverse closure on fly points but atleast tied back to another point or close the horizon. Unfortunately my TBC time is limited and usually rushed. Because know one cares to learn it and they just want the alta report and no matter if its right or wrong as long as it sais its good. I spent a few days hand calculating the rpp and allowable to see what TBC was doing. Then I know i can play with centering error height error angle tolerance etc. and change the semi major very easily which changes the rpp report. I am probably overkill on it i know. I am still fighting sub mm type work from my geodetic days and especially metrology time. I hope i will get a good balance soon. I need and have requested a TBC training class. I have watched and read all I can find on it but have that itch on the back of my kneck that sais your missing something. I have not used starnet since early 2000??s and mid 90??s. So I could absolutely be wrong in my remembering what all i was doing with it back then. Plus I was a green horn or greener than i am now. I just want to make it right and to be able to give the licensure person the confidence he needs if something comes up is all.
funny about brain surgery as i am reading this my wife is doctoring my head from surgery last week. Lol. I probably need brain surgery. Its always great reading your topics. You have a wealth of knowledge. Hopefully I will be able to get there at some point. This forum is great for learning and sharing for sure.
I jumped on Starnet when I was first made aware of it. Not sure when it was but had to be sometime between 1993-1995. I used and tested it against my older compass rule adjustments and it was clearly an upgrade and now you could use it to mesh together networks.
WOW!!!
Such an upgrade!!!
Then I got Trimble.
I’m not sure how long I kept starnet around but there were no more long traverses, no more complicated networks to adjust from instrument surveys. The new levels were imported into Trimble and adjustments are done with those programs.
Starnet faded away. With the newer era of GPS receivers and Geoid Models even the vertical has become usable.
I simply don’t have any data to use with Starnet. There really isn’t any point to add an adjustment on-top of adjusted data.
- Posted by: @mark-mayer
Your nerd is forgetting a third: when any part of the raw data is not in Trimble format. One of the major strengths of StarNet is it’s ability to combine data from various makers.
Oh, we’re not forgetting it, I was speaking mainly about its actual adjustment capabilities. It’s been many years since I worked for a firm that mixed manufacturers for total station and GNSS, and most of the time we ran data through a single-manufacturer collector. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have really needed to convert.
I wouldn’t pick StarNet over TBC based solely on that ability, though. Having a seamless field-to-finish package is a higher priority than adjustment software. TBC wins on the QC and analysis side too, especially when comparing the visual modelling and selection interfaces.
StarNet is still a great program. I’m generally going to use the processing software that was designed for the gear and datasets that I have.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman
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