Recently the softball team at my university asked our department if we could check the layout of their field and fix a couple of known errors in the baselines. When discussing the problems they were having with the field the coach told me that he knew he had a couple of dimension issues on his base paths, but he was not entirely sure how to fix them. He then proceeded to tell me that he'd like me to use GPS to check the layout and make any necessary corrections to the field, at which point I humbly told him that I would happily contribute to the effort, but I would use another method to check everything. I'm still a novice surveyor, and I have never undertaken any sort of layout that I computed and worked on autonomously before in my life. With that said, I found the experience quite enjoyable and wanted to share it with y'all if you'd allow me the time.
In the words of General Eisenhower, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." I take the time to mention this because I spent an evening shortly after our initial conversation reading the NCAA regulations for a softball field and then working up coordinates that I could punch in to a data collector and use with a robotic total station to check all of the layout (I assumed I'd be working by myself). Certainly after the meager 4 hour investment I had into the research, coordinate computations, and planning my method of doing the work, everything should happen exactly as I'd expect it to! Well anyone that has ever worked knows that General Eisenhower was correct in his statement, and I made a mistake I could not solve when setting up my high-speed robotic total station, and the consequence was that it wouldn't compute coordinates at the backsight or any other point I shot. I discovered later that when working in local coordinates you have to set the scale factor on a trimble data collector to "Scale factor only" instead of "no projection/no datum" during your job set up, which is what kept me from using my precious coordinate values.
With the robot acting funky and little interest in dealing with it, my department head and two of my classmates that happened to be on campus brought out an older Nikon gun to use instead. I learned how to survey using a nearly indentical instrument, but this was the beginning of my first experience working purely with angles and taped distances. Surely we could have used a prism to measure distances all along, but we elected to use the gun as an old theodelite and only derived angle values from it. With a coordinated effort from one of the coaches and our rag tag crew of three students, we were able to relocate home plate to its proper position on the field, and then reset the pitcher's rubber, second base, and third base. Our finding was that the only two points that were causing a visual alignment issue were the rubber and second base. Now the field is a lot closer to dimensionally perfect, and I had the pleasure of stepping back a little bit in time with the methods that I performed my work.
I say all of this to conclude that I considered the amount of labor that would have gone in to performing a topographic survey when all of the measurements were conducted in the same manner that we checked the softball field and I discovered a new appreciation for how awesome the older generations of surveyors were at their work. It's one thing to read about and discuss the methods of the men that came before me in this industry, but I believe you can not truly appreciate something until you have experienced it first hand. At the end of the day I was pretty happy that the damn robot was too smart for its operator that morning, because I enjoyed the experience of turning angles on a Nikon again.