Hello All,
I have an ongoing ever expanding project for a client. This client does his work, RTK, on the grid in UTM ( in fact he lays out a grid on the earth). My job is to provide control points, on ridge tops, hill tops or other advantageous points from which the clients RTK radio can best broadcast and also to provide boundary corner coordinates. I generate the coords for the control points, in meters on the UTM grid. Thank you very much OPUS. I also collect UTM coords for as many boundary corners and center line monuments as I can reasonably find. The client often has limited rights of access, so boundaries are important to him.
My most time consuming task is generating coords, in meters on the grid for the unfound boundary corners. I’m looking for a better way. Can anyone make suggestions?
Right now I draw the subdivision(s/d) boundaries in Autocad LDD 2004 on an assumed coordinate system using feet and accepting distances on the s/d maps as ground. Then I copy the lines into another LDD 2004 project, meter/grid. Scale the line work to meters (1200/3937). Scale the line work, once again, to grid using an average combined scale factor(csf) for an area. Then I translate/rotate the line work onto the UTM grid coords of the boundary cors I have found. I’ll then create points, in LDD 2004, on the nodes of the adjusted line work in the meter/grid project. Next I’ll export the meter/grid points to my Trimble Business Center (TBC) project, go back into the field with RTK and search for more boundary corners. Come back to the office, export out of TBC into LDD 2004 move the record or predicted meter/grid corner points onto the growing pile of found cor points, also meter/grid, using Triad, a least squares program that matches pairs of coords (not observations), to do a translate/rotate (I always set the scale factor to one so I can control the csf) fit of record to field in UTM grid. Then import adjusted points back into TBC.
Then the client will add some adjacent subdivision to the project and its back to the LDD 2004 feet project to generate line work from s/d maps. Then copy into the LDD 2004 meters project and scaling and translate/rotate and on it goes. One has to be meticulous and ever diligent in one’s manipulations while jumping data in and out of several programs. What single piece of software can jump back and forth from feet on the ground in an assumed (5000,5000) system to meters on the UTM grid and do a least squares adjustment of coordinate pairs while accommodating cogo’ing new points. Changes on this job are killing me, with all this back and forth.
I have Traverse PC 2010 personal version and am considering purchase of their new geodetic accommodating software. The ability to automatically label lines with azimuth and distance in two coord systems would be great. Can it go feet/arbitrary to meters/grid?
Thanks Rich.
I do the same kind of thing every day. I have found that it's less confusing to keep everything on the grid. My software has tools that let me load all my grid GPS data into the drawing and also to COGO-in plat data that is automatically projected to the grid. The program lets me annotate the lines on the ground or grid with geodetic or grid bearings. It's the old CAPD developed by the BLM. It's easy and it's free.
Tom
With TBC you can use any projection you wish.
Each point has common data (lat, long, height). If you want to work in SPC coordinates in feet and export those points to UTM meters, simply export the lat, long and heights from the SPC projected file to a UTM projected file. It will automatically create grid coordinates that can be sent into an autocad file.
I'd use TBC to control all the shifting back and forth; not autocad.
The important is to think of the points in Latitude, Longitude and Height. The XYZ coordinates are only a function of those elements.
How can a guy get a copy of CAPD?
My link has always been www.blm.gov/nstc/lisp/ but when I tried it just now, it didn't work. I wonder if the BLM took it down.
I looked for it earlier, and found that link, which was broken. It looked like they migrated a bunch of stuff to a new address and didn't take that along. No indication if that was intentional or accidental.
See the next higher level:
http://www.blm.gov/nstc/
Do I have it right that this is a bunch of Lisp routines that run under AutoCad?
Edit: You may want to see what you can make out of this document, that I don't fully understand.
IM-OC-2011-001Att2.pdf I get the sense they were moving away from CAPD.
