Equipment Ad

I object

Not because of anything in the ad, or Hayes, or you.

But, I know some surveyors who may take you up on opening shop with one of those, to perform ALTA's!

🙂

Yepper, git of them there Rolatape 401's, duct tape a hand-held GPS to the handle, and google earth on the cell phone ...... We be in business!!!!

I object

hat’s wrong with that – if you can PROVE you meet the positional tolerance? 😀

Some farm equipment today uses radar pointed at the ground to measure speed, then convert that to distance to control application rates. They measure closer than you would expect. Also fun to turn on when running down the highway and being crowded by speeders, just turn the radar on, all reduce their speed to the posted limits, those without detectors notice that those with them are slowing down and follow suit. Once I went by a police car with the radar turned on and the trooper was using his palm to jar his radar unit.
jud

We are glad to see that the Mid Week Markdown ad is getting to the surveying community.

I suspect most of those units we sell to people other than surveyors.

One of the things we should all recognize is that all the tools we use have applications other than what we use them for.

And there are appropriate non-surveying tools for certain projects that even surveyors could benefit from.

And finally, we have to realize that if what we think of as "survey supply" companies depended on land surveyors and only land surveyors for their livelihood, many of them would be out of business. One phenomenon I have noticed over the past few years is that the diversity of their clientele makes it unnecessary for some of them to even attend annual conferences. One of my favorite vendors goes to more "concrete shows" and even "golf shows" then she does "surveying shows".

That's a pretty sophisticated "Cal Myers EDM" 😛

There is one in the work truck that came from a yard sale.

The guys use it for recon and to find old hubs and monuments. Using it is safer than using a tape to measure across a highway and most guys today can't pace very well or don't know what it means.

There is a local utility company that uses one on all its easements. I've checked behind them and they are not even close.

In the early 80's we used them to measure recently poured concrete gutter.

They work very well for some applications and can be very accurate in the right hands.

I never use the results in my computations.

I know I've paid for a lot of striping quantities based on a measuring wheel. And I've hand the displeasure of having to recheck info measured w/ a wheel that liked to double count in the 100 s. Place.

> I know I've paid for a lot of striping quantities based on a measuring wheel. And I've hand the displeasure of having to recheck info measured w/ a wheel that liked to double count in the 100 s. Place.

Haha...
Need to run those wheels on a calibration baseline. Actually, a wheel (properly calibrated) might be a better estimate of painting stripes than a horizontal distance between two points.

Seriously, it might not be a bad idea to check the distances of them once in a while, but I agree with some of the above posts that it can certainly be a useful tool for many applications....As can a gps handheld, a compass, pacing, etc.

Just because it can be misused and/or is not as accurate as your expensive equipment, doesn't mean it's useless.

Most of those wheels are built with a known circumference, a finger sticking out that activates a counter. Hard to get out of adjustment. Their problem is that on every surface used there is slippage, some surfaces more than others.
jud

Jud's Farming Reference

The big boys in the agricultural equipment industry have jumped in with both feet in applying GPS and similar technologies to improve efficiencies in the world of agriculture. One fellow described to me how scary it was the first time he was sitting in the tractor seat with everything programmed in to plant a certain field. He was just along for the ride once he moved the tractor and planter into the starting positon. It was scary because there were fences and trees and other very important obstructions at the field edges. Very important because hitting them could result in thousands of dollars of equipment damage plus days of critical downtime during planting season.

Jud's Farming Reference

When I was involved with what we called Star Wars technology there were two navigation systems. One was setup using a chip with the soil data programed so rates of application could be changed by the computer, the navigation was basically a dead reckoning system where the operator placed the cursor at the start point indicated the direction and then the computer jumped over the machine width on the turns, a back and forth pattern was used. Position corrections were made by the operator. The other system again used a chip with the field data burned in along with two transmitters place outside of the field. The two vectors generated were used for navigation. GPS was just being looked at but had not reached the state of development to be useful, but it is used frequently today. With those systems and soil maps all you have to do is drive around the outside of the field once to obtain the boundary's and the computer will do it all including changing the application rates and the formula mix on the go when fertilizing or seeding, less waste that way. Never farmed using that stuff, it was ride the open cat, eat the dust while enjoying the wind and weather while wishing that your 12 hour day would end.
jud

striping application rates are along the ground, not on the horizontal, so you need to measure the surface. we figured thwe we was skipping when we couldn't match stationing. ( by several hundered feet.)

Are the pedals extra???