Once in rare while I have experienced a top-notch equipment demonstration. I received a demonstration from Geo Shack today at my office for a Topcon IS-3 Imaging Station and the new GR-5 GPS. I have been in this business for about 35 years, and I don't think I have ever had a product demonstration that even came close to this one. I am impressed, and now I am very well informed about the products. They sat right there and got after the stuff on the Imaging Station, and they had complete and total knowledge of how it works, and they had the ability to show me exactly how it works in a logical, straight-forward session. Much appreciated and just wanted to say it.
Frank
What did you think of the GR-5s?
Worth the money?
Frank
It seems OK ergonomically to me. It has a lot of technology that will be useful for L5, etc, but I believe that stuff is down the road about 5 years, and I wonder if the unit wouldn't be obsolete before the time it is fully usable.
The unit is actually a Javad. I had an experience with Javad a while back, having ordered and received a set, and although the units had some kind of special multipath protection, on a test run around my office I got erroneous fixes that showed a good RMS, but the accuracy was off by about 15 feet. This happened 3 times within about 15 minutes when I was next to the building. It just seemed to me that they would give bad initializations far too often even though they claimed to be the best. I returned the units during the pre-agreed brief trial period. This is not to say that Javad is not the best made, but it did not work for me, and becasue of that experience I'd test the heck out of them before I'd buy the new GR-5. So far I have seen nothing about post-processing software. The use of post-processed kinematic is somthing that is grossly under utilized in our profession (especially with the great satellite constellations we have now. And without a good processing software you can't use it. In the past, I have been disappointed in the Topcon post-processing software, but I am sure they have upgraded it. I just haven't seen it.
I was hopeful about the imaging station, having looked at the Topcon website where it was scanning a car beautifully. But during the demonstration, when we tried to scan a car in my front office parking lot, it simply would not scan it because the car was not dirty enough to reflect beams. Then we scanned a fire hydrant, and the scan and photograhic overlay it made did not look like a fire hydrant. In my opinion the Topcon ads for this device are misleading. I wasted a couple hours, but at least I know that the IS-3 is not for me. Topcon advertises 20 shots per second (as I recall), but during the scan it was shooting points slower than the S6 will scan. When the S6 is operating correctly it will kick the Imaging Station's rear in my opinion. S6 is much faster on searches than I saw the IS-3 do with the latest tracking. I believe S6 with geolock is the way to go, so that is where I am staying. I wish advertisements on some of this type of equipment were more realistic. But again, that is just my opinion.
