That is good advice about immediately turning tracking on...I have been trying to remember to do this everytime as I figured it wasn't counting towards the GPS calibration if it was not in tracking mode. Most of the sites I work at it's not possible to completely walk a 360 around the instrument, so I just do the best I can... usually it doesn't take long to say "gps search ready" but the gps search will still usually be off by several meters meaning that it won't see me at all at most working distances I'm typically at.?ÿ
Sometimes I feel like it has an easier time picking me up through the trees than out in the open. I would definitely stick to the s series if all I did was work in thick bush but on the construction sites I'll take the Leica....it has 5 seconds of prediction in the settings options so walking past a truck, trailer or pile of fill etc it will regain lock on the other side where the Trimble stopped after 3 seconds and I have to use the joystick again. The Leica powersearch will find you pretty quickly unless you climb like 10 feet higher than you were previously and search without joysticking it up a bit.?ÿ
Shooting in measure mode (as opposed to tracking) is also about 1 second with the Leica and 5 seconds in semi active mode with the Trimble. It feels painfully slow to shoot. Once again, yes I adjusted the settings to "2 observations" which is the minimum number. Out of the box it was higher and tool even longer.?ÿ
@350rocketmike i don??t walk 360 i just try and get out away from the instrument sometimes i will just prop rod up on bi pod a few hundred feet away and look at what i am about to do. I say once you get under a 100 feet or so i use joystick and tracking lights not gps search a few meters of gps accuracy is not good close up. The other is you should be able to set the prediction on it i walk behind dozers etc on sites and it anticipates me. There is a setting for it or atleast it use to be. I would up it on small commercial construction sites and shorten it when i was further away. Had a crew chief once ask me why i would change that i said because I don??t like searching i like pounding wood. He finally caught on and his rod man said every time we worked together he would comeback with a new tricks lol. Just close your left eye stand on 1 foot do the hokey pokey and hold your mouth right and all will be good in life. Lol. I am getting a tsc5 next week for an eval on doing a big job maybe i will see what i can hammer out on it if all goes well. I will be using it to perform an intergrated survey with s5 and r12i. I used intergrated survey methods on many jobs with s6 and 5800. But its not for every job but some jobs its the cats meow. I did a 50 acre boundary behind a 1 second traverse once for a test. I never set one control point. Just resection off gps to locate corners in woods. Gps in open field. Compared all results and the company said this was the deal breaker. He outfitted 3 crews with s6 and tsc2 and r8??s . I want to compare the canopy gps observations. I also want to test the javad system might be my next hobby to test.?ÿ
Yeah that's the problem, I'm rarely out far enough away for the gps search to be helpful. I've gotten the truck of turning on the guidelights, then opening joystick and getting it close horizontally (joystick is clunky especially with the intermittently freezing touchscreen bug so it takes a bit sometimes) but the tricky part is getting it pointed close enough vertically to find me.?ÿ
Yes the prediction settings can be changed from the default 1 second to a maximum of 3 seconds. Leica is 1, 3 or 5 and the difference between 3 and 5 is much more than you would think when you're walking quickly past an object blocking line of sight.?ÿ
Integrated sounds cool. Our company should get into that soon if we're all going to be forced onto Trimble equipment anyway.?ÿ
I did have good luck using the r10 with the tsc5 for the first time yesterday. I did a site calibration and it behaved just as the old tsc3 would. The bugs I've found all seem to be with robotic only so far.?ÿ
Here is a video of how the "check backsight" function should work (in my uneducated opinion)...I know it's hard to see the robot over the trailer but it turned right back to the horizontal and vertical angle I was originally at and got lock on me. I am not working with elevations on this job and had to put the pole up to go over the trailer so I'm not even at the exact same height for sure but close enough that it gets me right away.?ÿ
This wasn't the biggest reason I gave up on the Trimble robot for now, but one of the many contributing factors. I also just shot like 20 ICF corners reflectorless so another reason to prefer the Leica on this job.?ÿ
Some more info on GPS Search and how to use it efficiently: Trimble GPS Search
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Also, I think I see the problem with the stakeout video.
In the review job, there are two points in there called "503_stk". But looking at the map prior to the stakeout and acceptance of the current (second) stakeout, I don't see the flag symbol and point name "503_stk" where we are staking.
So there must be another prior, existing 503_stk, but not at the same location that we are staking to in the video. I would suspect a different linked file with a different 503 as the culprit.
Stake points cannot be averaged in the same way that topo shots can, because at the time of observation, it has to compute grid deltas and cut/fill info. Modifying a stake point after the fact would be messy and might cause some major problems with delta comps.
So it can't average them, but Access has to decide what to do with the final point in the database - it has to resolve it somehow because two separate points cannot exist with the exact same name.
So when encountering a stake point with the exact same name, Access will in effect run a "store another" routine in order to keep things straight, and stick the new observation under the old one, and display/hold to the original.
If you open up the point manager, scroll to 503_stk, you should see two different observations with two different coordinates. The first one observed will be what it holds for the final point position, but both will have the correct grid deltas if you review them.
This is normal behavior and, while a bit confusing, usually doesn't occur unless there are two different points with the same name being linked from two different files. (Edit to add: or unless you accept a position which is way, way off from the design point location, store it, and then go back and stake it out again and use the exact same store name with a position which is now at the design location.)
@rover83?ÿ
I already figured out that an already existing 503_stk is what caused the software to lose its mind...I still don't understand why it couldn't be bothered to tell me the point already exists.....we deal with this all the time and I would expect it to say "hey dummy this point number is already used, you want to rename it?" Instead of just storing a point 6mm from another point 160m away from me without giving me any indication of this.?ÿ
I am not really liking the whole point number philosophy with Trimble, with a hierarchy of numbers. I'm starting to understand how it works, but I feel like they way overcomplicated it when we could just be prompted to rename, or average or overwrite, like the other softwares I've used in the past. At least then this wouldn't have happened.?ÿ
I've already talked to my pm about this issue and he's aware that now he's going to have to sit and spend a few hours deleting all the old _stk points from every drawing to prevent this in the future.?ÿ
Is there another suggestion for storing in staking besides backing out and measuring like a sideshot? Can we just do a check shot from inside the staking routine so we don't store a new name at all?
@rover83?ÿ
I already figured out that an already existing 503_stk is what caused the software to lose its mind...I still don't understand why it couldn't be bothered to tell me the point already exists.....we deal with this all the time and I would expect it to say "hey dummy this point number is already used, you want to rename it?" Instead of just storing a point 6mm from another point 160m away from me without giving me any indication of this.?ÿ
I am not really liking the whole point number philosophy with Trimble, with a hierarchy of numbers. I'm starting to understand how it works, but I feel like they way overcomplicated it when we could just be prompted to rename, or average or overwrite, like the other softwares I've used in the past. At least then this wouldn't have happened.?ÿ
I've already talked to my pm about this issue and he's aware that now he's going to have to sit and spend a few hours deleting all the old _stk points from every drawing to prevent this in the future.?ÿ
Is there another suggestion for storing in staking besides backing out and measuring like a sideshot? Can we just do a check shot from inside the staking routine so we don't store a new name at all?
I dunno, I've never had this happen to me while on a job, we separate all our staking points to be on different ranges for different applications. Storm on 6000, sanitary on 7000, etc. Everything is prepped in CAD from a master construction drawing file, so we're barred from having duplicate point numbers even before we get to Access.
We don't use points much at all anyways now that the DXF, surface and alignment staking is so much easier than in the past.
I don't see a need to delete anything, or spend more than a few minutes to fix. One could renumber the CSVs that you are linking to stake (a couple minutes in Excel) to avoid overlapping numbers, or even give those numbers a unique suffix for each file (since Trimble supports alphanumeric names).
If there's no way to modify, or split out point ranges for stakeout files, and you want to be absolutely sure that stake points are not stepping on each other, just change the as-staked name to "Auto point name" and the as-staked code to "Design name". This will allow you to reference the point that was staked, but in the description/code rather than the number/name:
Hierarchies exist in pretty much every software program, but Trimble tends to put it front and center. Personally I like it because I can always look at the point manager to see what's going on and why, and if I don't get it the help files are pretty detailed.
The critical thing is to remember that it's not storing those subsequent stake shots incorrectly, it's just displaying the very first stake shot as the location in the map. Importing into TBC will split out those separate observations and confirm that everything's good, and if you run a stakeout report in the collector, both of those observations will show up with the correct deltas to the point that was actually staked out.
We use TSC5s. I like the size, shape and weight of the device. I??m not too fond of the pole clamp. Sometimes the touch screen needs to be convinced I really want to do that, like you need a hammer for a stylus. Android kind of sucks. At first the file transfer was primitive but it worked without hiccups. Then the Android system got updated and I get this thing where I transfer the project folder onto my thumb drive and get 0kb files. Figured out to wait for the progress bar on the bottom. That worked a few times until it didn??t. So now I have to wait an unspecified amount of time after the progress bar finishes to be sure it copied the files.
The TSC3 was the pinnacle in my opinion, Windows Mobile is better, Access was better, the pole clamp was less clunky and stupid. The TSC5 comes with a bag which is tight with the claw installed on it, the claw is hard to get off so I prefer to leave it on there.
Overall it works and the 5? screen is better. All the field operations work for us without bugs.
I loved the TSC3, but now I really don't want to give up that 7" screen. If you set a TSC5 on top of a TSC7, they're darn near the same physical size but the 5's screen doesn't quite do it for me.
The Windows Mobile platform was fine except for processing power and storage space. Well, that and the fact that it got decommissioned by Microsoft.
On that note, the story I heard was that Microsoft had a mobile version of Windows 10 in the works during the TSC7 design period, but then MS scrapped the mobile OS and Trimble had to scramble to work with the standard version, and as a result the TSC7 was not as light or battery-efficient as it was originally envisioned.
@rover83 2 advantages of the 5: 1) weight, it??s lighter than the TSC3 2) battery life is a day plus.
@rover83 2 advantages of the 5: 1) weight, it??s lighter than the TSC3 2) battery life is a day plus.
For sure. Depends on what you're doing. I don't do truly remote work any more, but if I were to go back in the bush I might want the 5. The TSC5 weight is barely less than the 3, so for me it's a wash.
For battery life, in my view things have shifted. I used to stuff a half dozen "camcorder" batteries for the R6 and R8 rovers in my vest at the beginning of the day, knowing that I was going to run through all of them - without worrying about my TSC3 battery. Now I only need one or two R10/R12 batteries, and maybe one or two TSC7 batteries, and the controller batteries are hot swappable to boot. I carry less weight overall, and have to deal with a pound more on the controller, but get more bang for my buck onscreen.
@rover83?ÿ
I did miss the 7" screen from the Panasonic toughpad when I used the tsc5. The Panasonic fits on top of the tsc7 takes up less space than only the top of the tsc7 not including the keyboard and gets 2 day battery life with the extended battery or 1 day with the standard. I really wanted them to get me a radio to use access on the Panasonic but they are sending a new tsc7 and we're returning the tsc5 after that. Until then I'm using the Leica with the Panasonic toughpad again.?ÿ
I will definitely miss the tablet, except when it's raining or snowing. It's faster than the tsc7 and weighs significantly less than the tsc5.?ÿ
Is it safe to buy the tsc5 now ??ÿ just checking in.
If you tilt the tsc7 screen at just the right angle to catch the sun, you can see it is made up of a bunch crosses in the background?ÿ for .. guessing some type of polarized view.?ÿ It's really cool.?ÿ
I would not, at least not for a while. They will be doing updates to fix the glitches, I don't know if it will be 6 months or over a year before a reasonable amount of them are fixed.
Also it depends on how large your typical jobs are. I work mainly in subdivisions and most of my uploads are 3000+ points, sometimes 5000+ and a DXF. The Panasonic fz-m1 and tsc7 can handle it fine but the tsc5 chugs on it. It also takes 20+ seconds to load the point manager in most of them.?ÿ
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