I've seen maybe one or two DCs truly, actually, completely fail in the field in my ~20 years, and both were back in the mid- to late-2000s. I've seen one instrument completely fail around 2009. Most of the time it's a battery issue or the software needs a hard reset. Pretty good track record right there. The time saved by advancing technology vastly outweighs the time lost in the few instances where it does fail. Even though it may not seem like that at the time the gear craps out.

The contractors and builders we work with use technology too. They also employ backups as much as they can, but they are also forced to go back to the office for a replacement, or buy a completely new unit, from time to time. I'd say the gear most surveyors use, especially considering the precision and delicacy of the actual measurement hardware/software, is pretty rugged these days.

If it's a high-dollar, high-stress job without an easy way to get back to the office or resupply, it's a job that needs a contingency plan and the backup gear to carry out that plan. I did my share of remote Alaska surveys. You don't leave without a spare (older but still working) DC, or possibly even an older manual total station for a backup.

If it's an in-town job? Depending on the work to be done, it's faster to drive back to the office and pick up the spare than to try and cobble together a solution. I've done what @olemanriver did with a level and stadia rod to get topo shots. But that ain't happening for monumentation where you need to meet state or ALTA minimum standards for relative positional accuracy. So it goes.

It's all about adaptation. Firms/leadership may elect to put controls/backups in place to minimize the pain when something actually does go wrong. If they're smart, they'll figure out estimated downtime from gear SNAFUs and weigh that against the cost of keeping spares on hand, then make a decision (and hopefully account for it in billing rates too).

If not, that's how it goes. No use getting all bent out of shape about it unless it becomes a pattern with a specific piece of gear. I've gotten a lemon total station before. Replace it and move on.

Learning the old school ways is useful...until it's not. It's hard to know when a procedure or piece of gear's time is up, and there are certainly some folks who can make (a little) money by avoiding new tech completely. Remote sensing (terrestrial and aerial LiDAR) has made inroads on what was exclusively the province of total stations.

We're far from ditching total stations, but they might be obsolete in a century, or be relegated to backup/emergency gear, if we make it that far. Never say never.

@olemanriver?ÿ

Same here, wouldn't care about software on the ts, just need angles and distances, pretty basic stuff. Can't believe Trimble got away with taking those away, even in today's day and age. I'm 39 so I embrace technology but I remember when it didn't exist. A walkman was a huge deal when I was a kid.?ÿ

@rover83 yeah it doesnƒ??t happen often for sure. 80ƒ??s and 90ƒ??s equipment was not always as reliable. But most of the time you are correct. Take a deep breath slow down and reboot lol. I guess a trip back to the office is quicker might depend on where one is and time of day though. ?ÿHere to drive 10 miles could be over an hour. Lol. If you are up north closer to the city. Not un heard of to go 30 miles even on interstate to be an hour plus drive. Yeah I reckon if i had to set control or locate a monument to ALTA specs with a steel tape and transit would be a little time consuming. But not impossible. A wild 1ƒ? transit has better angular accuracy than what most surveyors have in the field now. Here it is 3ƒ? and 5ƒ? guns. Now distance can be achieved with a steel tape with correct procedures and crew members. But two people probably not. And heck most are running one man crews. Which how do you become a crew chief of no crew. Lol. In steep hills rover you would have to go back to slope chaining. And keep it all at slope until the end to keep from breaking chain so many times. You are correct I have outlived the techniques I first learned on. Maybe they will come in handy once in a while. Maybe not. I reckon if some solar flare knocked out all electronics gps and electric total stations i might see smoke signals requesting my help. Or a carrier pigeon lol. I like technology and i like to make it work for me. I see a lot of people working for technology they purchased. They allow it to dictate everything. Instead of using it in a way that makes money is more productive and better quality data. Like you stated yesterday. Some will be left behind. I see it happening already.

@350rocketmike A walkman lol My younger Marines while deployed laughed at me as i sat processing data with my box of tapes and my walkman. ?ÿThey had the MP3 players and such. So at Christmas they bought me a cd player walkman and download a bunch of my favorite old tapes in that mp3 format for me. I think they had most of my george jones don Williams Charlie pride TN ernie ford all on one cd. How they did all the music on the cd blew me away. Now my daughter she is 11 helps me use the Apple Music app. When i am not listening to surveying education i play the music now. I remember my first walkman man i was cool. My first truck was a 77 ford and no radio. So i used my boom box and later my walkman.

@jitterboogie well yes. He recorded his class session on vhs tape. Him and my boss use to help teach classes. So my boss would bring home the vhs tapes lectures. I would watch them at home in a bean bag or hook up the vcr to hotel tv and study. Then I would take the exam. I was working an average of 80 hours a week back then. I was in a hotel more than home. We would come home Saturday night late be home Sunday. Monday morning before the rooster crowed we were headed back out of town. We would stop by office get pierdiem and i would swap tales out. He helped write a lot of the original curriculum at the DMS he was well known by the old folks that were geodetic surveyors from now called NGA. Back then it was DMA defense mapping agency. And they were located in his hometown well one of the departments was. When I worked in the GPS division one guy new him very well. I liked his lectures and it was a big help for me to take boundary law at my own pace sorta. It cost me a lot though. I had to pay out of state fees because Colorado said you had to live in the state two years. I had saved up to go straight through a bs program. My wife got a drafting job and i was going to do school. But when we arrived with my envelope for my first semester cash I almost fell out. 19 years old and the price more than doubled. I sold a lot of watermelon toted shingles cleaned horse stalls fenced trained horses hay firewood. An had surveyd for 4 or 5 years saving every dime and penny i could to put myself through a surveying school. I attended junior colleges and tech schools after graduating high school. All cash each semester. If I didnƒ??t have the money I didnƒ??t go. I had to pawn my recurve bow one year to buy the road and bridge book. One of my regrets I never actually got a degree. 144 credit hours and no degree. My son got his though. And oldest daughter is working hers now. I was not academic material earlier in life. I also had no guidance on how to do it. My first college same thing i took an envelope with cash for the semester. I had no clue about how to register or anything. I paid the professor the cash he wrote the check to the school. I had savings account no checking account back the. ?ÿI paid my truck note at the bank until I graduated high school and then paid it off. My mom wanted me to know about notes. Lol. Back the book had a little booklet and tore out the payment and paid they signed the other part in your book. I still prefer cash actually. I still live like if i canƒ??t buy it now i save for it. But it has become harder and harder to do these days.

@rover83 Have you ever ran the old SDR 24. Or the old green husky dc. The sdr 24 would cold boot and loose everything if you went to about 1000 shots records. The sdr 33 improved but you always crossed your fingers when replacing the 9 volt batteries. One at a time. Pre placing data collector s on charge days. The old husky was a tough dc. And you could get survey software or write your own. C&g tds pre survey pro. And a few other ones. I never lost data on a husky or a tsc1. Sdr 24 and sd33 lost several times of a days work.?ÿ

when I left MS TN to go to CO. At that time the greatest technology was being used more out west than east from my perspective. We were building roads and templates in the dc out west. In the east we would lay coords for pc pt pi. And then set up and comp delta left and right and lay out roads run levels for grades slope stake with level. Out west slope stake with data collector etc. lay out anything on a road from control vs setting up on the pc etc.?ÿ

@350rocketmike?ÿ

hell when you were a kid the walkman had already evolved into the Discman.

???

@olemanriver?ÿ

I had walkmans, then several portable CD players, one mp3 player before moving on to android smartphones in around 2011.?ÿ

Currently I'm holding onto my lg v60 (lg stopped making phones 2 years ago) because I use the headphone jack every day and it has a huge battery. Best phone I've ever owned. Very few glitches. Apple started the nonsense of removing useful features. I kind of feel like Trimble is the Apple of surveying gear. I tried an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 11 and both times switched back to android pretty quickly cause it works better for me.?ÿ

@jitterboogie?ÿ

Yeah it came out in like 84 but most people I knew couldn't afford one until the mid 90s at least.?ÿ

@olemanriver?ÿ

One older party chief I used to work with would rave about how great the SDR was. Unfortunately I never got to see one in action. I did export raw data in sdr33 format (and rw5) when I used Magnet field, giving the office two options so hopefully they could make one or the other work.?ÿ

As with most things this is not an 'either or' situation.

I detest topographic surveys, yet I tolerate them to afford boundary and cadastral. The new toys add efficiency and a bit of fun to the mix. I'm not so much concerned with 'failures' as they are infrequent and usually easy to overcome. The real problem is slavery.

You don't have to take a college course to learn how to turn a 90 with a theadolite or older total station. Pulling out the auto-level to grab a few verticals doesn't take some old school guru days to teach. The skills aren't the issue, it's the lack of creative thinking that comes with overdependence on tech.

There are two qualities required of every true crew chief. First, the ability to select the most efficient equipment and method to adequately achieve the task at hand. Second, knowing when a check is truly a check. I contend this is the 'problem with tech', and has been since the pantometer overtook the equerre. Tech is not in fact the problem. Overdependence on tech is the issue...?ÿ

@thebionicman yeah over depending on tech. Nope doesnƒ??t require a lot to do levels or stadia topo. It just requires the knowledge. Just like bucking in a line or wiggling in a line. Or doing a house toping procedure to stay on a line and get around a tree. It only requires the understanding of the error sources and math and you donƒ??t even have to do the math to perform those but understand the math is a requirement or you could get burned. ?ÿItƒ??s applying the basic math we learned in middle school. ?ÿI asked a crew chief who has been one for 7 years had a great resume good reputation. ?ÿTo do an inverse. No one had ever taken the time to show him the math. He had done it a lot in data collectors knew why he needed or when he needed it. But had never done it outside a software platform. For distance or bearing. ?ÿHow did our profession get to that point. ?ÿThese are basics. And once i showed him he knew it was not called north and east in school but x and y. Know one had ever made him connect that which he knew to what he was doing. He is way smarter than I. It was just a disconnect. ?ÿLike a lady once that asked me to raise boneless chicken breeds. ?ÿShe had a phd. But she never connected the fact that no such thing as a boneless chicken breed. She buys boneless chicken at grocery store. Never had bought a whole chicken and sliced and diced. Just the parts. ?ÿIts not stupidity its a disconnect that people donƒ??t even realize. ?ÿConvenience be it technology or what. In all aspects of life have made us not connect reality often. ?ÿOne of the other reasons a go broke farming. So my kids get to learn things and see and feel and hear and smell so all the senses help keep them connected in someway. I love technology. I just have learned not to depend on it. ?ÿIts great its fun. But with every iteration i try and connect back to stay grounded.

Must have hit a nerve.

Opened up today and found 19 notifications.?ÿ All but two were comments to this thread.

My original post was aimed at far more than surveying.?ÿ Our lives have becomes so simplified at achieving mundane tasks that we may not have ever witnessed alternate solutions.?ÿ This then requires we use our "built-in computer", our own brain.?ÿ I realize that thought is becoming more and more bizarre.

It's that searching for answers the hard way that we are losing bit by bit.?ÿ Each generation becomes farther from developing simple solutions to something that they solve routinely with electronics.

"MacGyver" was a really hokey TV show using unrealistic solutions to urgent and vital problems.?ÿ But, at least, it got the viewer to thinking in terms of "How to".?ÿ Most workers today don't do "How to" work, so they are being conditioned to simply stop and throw their hands up in despair.?ÿ Multi-step solutions seem to be too complex for most people who have lived their entire lives coddled by electronics.

well, that phd woman OleManRiver mentioned got me thinking about how to grow boneless chickens.?ÿ After much thought, I figured if they can grow boneless beef, they should be able to grow boneless chickens. ???? ???? ?????ÿ

?ÿ

@hpalmer?ÿ

That's along the same lines of someone asking how you plant watermelons that are "seedless watermelons".

?ÿ

Each generation becomes farther from developing simple solutions to something that they solve routinely with electronics.

?ÿ

That adaptability in a bunch of young men, especially farm boys, was one of the contributing factors to the Allied win in WWII. They knew what needed to be done and found a way. Nowadays I doubt we could even get a plane off the ground without a comm link from US headquarters. The technology has been made essential.

@holy-cow Loved that old show. Found some old re runs and said to myself how cheesy it was. But as a youngster I had my swiss army knife and it went everywhere with me. Up until 911 changed the airport rules. I always had that swiss army knife and a case one armed man pocket knife. Had that groove at the end and you could open it on the seams of your pants and have a bale of hay in one hand knife in the other pol the strings and never miss a beat. ?ÿ

You are so right it has dripped into every aspect of our lives. ?ÿI consider myself very lucky. As i saw all of this and was able to make decisions with my second marriage and younger kids to try and correct some of that for them. Came home Thursday from work and saw hay stacked outside on the ground. ?ÿSaid what are the kids up to now. Walked over and they had started building some play house out of some small squares. ?ÿThey had a bedroom a corral for the play horses a kitchen bathroom (bucket) and yes made a bed . Came inside and asked the wife if she knew how much money was laying on the ground. She laughed and said hey look at what they made. I said yep letem use the brains. Tonight my 8 year old comes in and said it was going to rain. So i said ok. She said i have a sick horse i need to get in the barn. I said ok. Play horses mind you. But she we t out did who knows what. I have learned the hard way. Give the kids things and step back. Donƒ??t give them what they want let them create it themselves. ?ÿLost a calf today. We got mom away and took calf to burry. Backhoe didnƒ??t want to start at first. 8 year old 11 year old grabs a large rock. Starts digging. Thank goodness for my sake it finally started. But it was a pleasure to see them say well thats not working we have a job to do so what is around to help us finish it. She the 8 year old placed third in a book presentation. We did nothing to help except buy her the presentation board because she had cut up and taped some old boxes to make her own. Of course as we walked and saw all the competitors it was easy to see what moms and dads had done vs the kids themselves. Hers was her work from poor writing to colors and gluing the notes on. But it is a con to all of this. I have not taught her to ask for help very well when she needs it. She does herself what she can make or figure out. So i am still learning the balance in that. Any advice will be received well. But being in the work force in so many different ways i see the lack of initiative and lack of problem solving. If the technology dies then we must stop and call the experts. Not how can i get this done a different way.?ÿ

@holy-cow that is the best meme on the planet lol. What is so sad is we have created an environment that encourages this thinking. Time for a little old fashion hard work again. How many of yall took old lawnmowers and made go karts. Or a old push mower strip the engine and now add a 55 gallon barrel to try and make it easier to move things around. ?ÿEverything we want or need we just can buy now days. We need a resurrection of repurposing things again. Or maybe some very hard times to make us not buy but make ourselves. ?ÿI was asked once as a kid by a young lady i was dating while driving around a cotton field. Why does everyone have a junk pile hidden at the edges of fields out here. I said its not junk its just pieces of something great one day. Old bicycle ?ÿand car hoods. Become sleds or a way to role up old wire the bicycle ?ÿ.

@olemanriver?ÿ

Over 50 years ago I was working for a fellow doing farm-related work when I had time.?ÿ He had a quarter section of open farmland that he had put up an electric fence to graze the entire place at once.?ÿ That's two miles of smooth electric fence wire that needed to be rolled up.?ÿ He jacked up a pickup, pulled off a rear wheel and replaced it with a wheel with no tire.?ÿ Then he threaded the electric wire through a length of about three inch iron pipe and tied it off around the bare wheel.?ÿ I put the truck in gear and let the wire be pulled by the turning wheel while he adjusted the end of the pipe a bit to help keep an even wind.?ÿ In what seemed like no time at all, we had all two miles of wire on that wheel.?ÿ That was HEAVY but effective.?ÿ He could reverse the process when it came time to put the wire back up someday.