In the past, our field guys have used their ipad to pull up google earth where they can see their location (little blue dot) and they can view any KMZ I sent them. This has worked well when I need extra cross sections, or have problem areas I need to point out. We are looking at buying some additional equipment and were thinking about moving away from the ipads for a couple of reasons. 1st, the little blue dot acts crazy and jumps all over the map with the new updates (any fix for this?) and 2, we wanted something with the ability to plug a USB device into.
Any suggestions on what to get or how to make google earth work correctly on the ipad?
Get an external bluetooth GPS receiver for the iPad, such as the Garmin Glo or Dual XGPS160. $100-$150. Works great.
andrewm, post: 391833, member: 10888 wrote: Get an external bluetooth GPS receiver for the iPad, such as the Garmin Glo or Dual XGPS160. $100-$150. Works great.
Do you think this would work to keep the little blue man in the right spot?
What is weird is it works fine in google maps, or other mapping products, but google earth (where we can see our kmz files) it acts crazy. It does it on my personal Iphone as well....
It should. I've done a lot of field data collection using smart phones and tablets. Built-in GPS is pretty worthless. Bluetooth external will override built-in cellular assisted GPS. As long as you don't need survey grade accuracy, it's great. If you need better than 3-5m accuracy, you could use a Trimble R1 (<1m), but those are much more expensive.
andrewm, post: 391836, member: 10888 wrote: It should. I've done a lot of field data collection using smart phones and tablets. Built-in GPS is pretty worthless. Bluetooth external will override built-in cellular assisted GPS. As long as you don't need survey grade accuracy, it's great. If you need better than 3-5m accuracy, you could use a Trimble R1 (<1m), but those are much more expensive.
Or you could look at the Geode from Juniper Systems, which we sell. These are a great product, designed to work with a phone or tablet, although at this time they don't have an iOS app. Last I heard they were working on one with the hope it would be released by the end of the year.
Take a look at Geo-PDF's and Geo-Tiff images rather than .kml files.
Avenza PDF works well with these file types.
Imagine taking a scanned image of a subdivision map...roughly geo-referencing that image to a Google Earth image....making the white background transparent to reveal the aerial image....then uploading to dropbox...the crew downloads from dropbox and can see their position and orientation relative to the aerial image AND the subdivision boundary lines.
Easy to do if you have ArcMap software. i-Pad works fine for this type of mapping.
You can also upload geo-referenced construction plans to quickly get your bearing on where design features are located.Never had issues with the blue dot jumping around in Avenza software.