One button surveying

I heard of this for the first 2 weeks at a Drone/Mapping training session.

An end user told me they had purchased 9 of these GPS ground stations for $5500. It appears they are L1 static GPS receivers that require post processing.

FYI there were nearly 60 people at this training, and one one surveyor. None of them understood GPS, coordinates systems or ground control.

This drone technology appears much like GIS. Surveyors should be playing an important role here, but may be missing the boat once again.

Shouldn't this be in the humor category?

I sure got a good chuckle out of it.

😉

The trouble with drone surveying is that you need ground control to do it, so we are going to help out where you don't have to do ground control anymore.

All you have to do is to go to 5-10 places around the site, paint an x on the ground and then place a "cube" on it and let it sit there until it BEEPS.

This way you don't have to do "ground control" WOW!!!!

What a revolutionary system:cool:

From my point of view, most of the time spent making the product is office time.

I can not see how this will help me on a boundary survey of 250 acres or 10 acres or a 1/4 acre town lot.

Just more foolishness you see these days. Toys, toys, toys. Very few serious people nowadays.

makerofmaps, post: 401765, member: 9079 wrote: [MEDIA=youtube]PJw_k2cVKgc[/MEDIA]

http://www.epocdronesurvey.com/

They must have figured out multipath. 4" off the ground...

Yeah, I had a friend send me this kick-starter page for them.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/141973618/one-button-survey-obs?ref=creator_nav

I thought it was a joke up until I realized it wasn't.:mad:
"In this test the OBS survey system produced 2mm of error including the Z (elevation), compared to 1mm of error in the "professional" system."

You know, about three years ago I decided that I was not doing the world any favors selling single frequency receivers (PM2, PM3, PM120). There were just too many errors involved in post processing long vectors to CORS with L1 only. So I commissioned a L1/L2 receiver and pretty much broke the price barrier on dual frequency receivers. (I think the best price was $7,400 and I dropped it to $2K more or less.)

It appears that the OBS is a L1/L2 receiver. So it may be possible to get an OPUS solution on the 'Base' unit and then process the rest of the points against the OPUS solution on the base.

The OBS antenna element is not much smaller than the antenna in Javad's TR2. (Of course, three years ago I agonized over not using a choke ring antenna!) And if you set the antenna on the ground in an open area there is no multipath because the ground plane is essentially infinite. So that might not be a big deal. There is the issue that not all ground is the same, so the electrical phase center of the OBS antenna is going to vary greatly depending if it is on the ground or in free air. (In other words, the L1 Offset may vary several cm depending on the type of ground the antenna is placed on.)

I looked and did not find a relative or absolute antenna calibration for the OBS, but it would not be that big of a deal to send a 1/2 dozen to Geo++ with a $10,000 bill and get a type mean calibaration done.

If the online processing software automates the OPUS submission (or the CORS tie) and then the processing of the Base against the Rover positions, then I don't see why it necessarily has to be that crappy.

However, I would point out that this business and the drone survey business are Support and Service businesses. If they were not, then we would all be purchasing our RTK and Robotic gear on eBay and having it shipped direct from the manufacturer. It would be the equivalent of buying toilet paper at Costco or Walmart.

And what scares me the most is the drone operators who are going to purchase the OBS don't know:

• the difference between Grid and Ground
• the difference between Ortho and Ellipsoid heights
• the difference between US Survey Feet and International Feet
• the difference between surveying and mapping
• the difference between IGS08 Current Epoch and NAD83 2011 2010.0 fixed Epoch

I am just going to throw out the idea that these want-to-be cheapo drone surveyors are really only able to screw bigger things things up faster than our current button pushers.

Who is going to teach these non-surveyor drone operators (and the GIS folks) the basic geodesy that they so badly need?

M