My company has a few guys that go around to our job sites (pre construction) and do soil tests. Majority of the time they have to go back to the same spots and resample everything. Typically these samples are in corn fields, and placing stakes between the stalks is essentially useless because they'll never find the stakes.
My question is, is there a handheld GPS unit I can get for them where they can punch in their desired Lat/Long so can walk to the points themselves? Accuracy only needs to be within a foot or so (horizontally), nothing extreme. I do not have the time to sit with them all day and go point to point with them using my survey grade unit.
Mobil Mapper or PM3
PM3 is End Of Life and I would not trust them to hit 1' repeatably. They have battery issues now, the IOPods are unobtainium and they take forever to acquire SV's (at least when compared to modern devices.)
A MobileMapper 120 would work great, I personally use one with SurvCE on it in float mode. Get GLONASS if you are under canopy.
Nothing will match the MM120 for WAAS corrected accuracy, and under canopy if GLONASS is enabled they are demonstrably better than anything else I have ever tried.
That said, if you only need a couple of foot accuracy, you could do it with a consumer grade Garmin (get one that tracks GLONASS) and save a pile of $. And your crews could use them during hunting season too.
🙂 Have a great weekend!
Mark
Mark Silver, post: 341657, member: 1087 wrote: if you only need a couple of foot accuracy, you could do it with a consumer grade Garmin
Unless there has been some recent revolution in capabilities, that won't cut it by an order of magnitude. Mine gives me about 6 foot repeatability under ideal conditions on a good day, and often worse.
Couple of other options, Satlab SL55, or SL300. The SL56 is L1-Only GPS+ Glonass.
The SL300 is RTK Rover capable with internal GSM Modem. Runs SurvCE, and/or ESRI ArcPad & ArcGISMobile.
Sabre970, post: 341643, member: 7481 wrote: My company has a few guys that go around to our job sites (pre construction) and do soil tests. Majority of the time they have to go back to the same spots and resample everything. Typically these samples are in corn fields, and placing stakes between the stalks is essentially useless because they'll never find the stakes.
My question is, is there a handheld GPS unit I can get for them where they can punch in their desired Lat/Long so can walk to the points themselves? Accuracy only needs to be within a foot or so (horizontally), nothing extreme. I do not have the time to sit with them all day and go point to point with them using my survey grade unit.
I would take a look at the Leica Geosystems Zeno 20 with Zeno Mobile. It runs on the Android OS so you can load various apps and from what I have seen it has Dropbox integrated directly to the field software so you can easily load background shapefiles and export to shapefile, KML and ASCII.
I'm a forestry guy, and I'm getting about that accuracy under forest canopy with a Javad TRIUMPH-2 and ArcPad. There's a bit of a learning curve, and it's not cheap, and there are a lot of moving parts, but it works, most of the time.
I'd recommend a Trimble R1 "attached" to device running something like ArcPad.
The whole issue with MGIS receivers is the stake-out ability, since their accuracy is a function of post-processing.
Actually, I don't generally recommend this solution since we don't have RTX is Alaska, but maybe a Geo7 using RTX is an option.
Talk to your Trimble or Leica MGIS rep on what they would recommend for a unit that has submeter and real-time abilities.