This is an interesting thread.
It illustrates how quickly surveying has changed.
This country was surveyed by sighting long distances, a 14,000' sight was nothing to the old surveyors who did that work.
Just look at an old datasheet with all the visible and used sights from a USGS monument. Some might be 20-30 miles away.
Now a tiny 14,000' sight is a big deal.
I know I would probably struggle pointing to it with my S6, but not with the T2.
Really it's no big deal to see 14,000', it takes some skill and practice to get good at it, but for this one shot please go do it and have fun, as long as the two points are inter-visible and there aren't messy heat waves it's easy. If there is an atmospheric issue you can always do this at dawn or dusk or even at night.
I used to sight up a tri station on the hill, I would put an ice cream bucket lightly painted orange on a conduit, held up plumb with wire, flagging on the wire to help pick it out. We would turn angles to it all summer. Sometimes the instrument would be 15-20 miles from the tri station.
Another trick you can do is make a leaf fire and that way you can find the target and then use the signal attenuater to get maximum signal shoot your distance and your good.
Don't forget to put the fire behind the target. The heatwaves will interfere if you put it in front.
Try doing it at night like the good old days of geodetic surveying. Use a strobe to help find the prism or buy one of the prisms with a strobe built in or shine a light into the prism form a short distance to light it up. As Moe said how quickly we forget, there was a lot of good work done in the past without the more automated equipment we have now.
T.W.
Not an EDM shot, but in 1878 the USC&GS observed a triangulation line of 192 miles, sighting a heliotrope on Mt Helena from Mt Shasta in California.
Not sure what the longest EDM line in the US is, but there are routine distance measurements to reflectors on the moon (lunar laser ranging). Not your ordinary EDM, but nevertheless a distance measurement. I think SLR (satellite laser ranging) us more common that the moon shots.
I can't speak to the S7 question, I have no idea what it's "real world" capabilities are.
My longest EDMI "shot" was something just over 206,000 ft. (a Utah Peak to a Wyoming Peak) back in ~1983 with Cubic Electro Tapes.
My longest LASER "shot" was probably somewhere between 55,000 & 60,000 ft. out in Nevada somewhere using an AGA Model 78 in the late 80s or early 90s.
20-30 thousand foot shots were so routine back in those days, that I never though much about it.
Loyal
Made many a 10,000 ft shot back in the 2980s. Flash the sun into the prisms using a Siva Compass mirror. You won't have any trouble spotting it.
Skeeter1996, post: 451054, member: 9224 wrote: Made many a 10,000 ft shot back in the 2980s. Flash the sun into the prisms using a Siva Compass mirror. You won't have any trouble spotting it.
WOW, was the flux capacitor involved?
😉
Loyal, post: 451055, member: 228 wrote: WOW, was the flux capacitor involved?
😉
Dr. Emmett Brown: This is it! This is the answer. It says here... that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 pm, next Saturday night! If... If we could somehow... harness this lightning... channel it... into the flux capacitor... it just might work. Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!
Loyal, post: 451055, member: 228 wrote: WOW, was the flux capacitor involved?
😉
Whoops that's 1980's. But the Flux capacitor was around about that time.
James Fleming, post: 450646, member: 136 wrote: +1
The longest shot I took back in the day when I was in the field all the time was about 8,000 with a Set 3. I had to drape a florescent vest on the tripod to get in the general vicinity and move the cross hairs around until I got a return.
Somewhere i picked up an outrageously flourescent sheet from the US Army Signal Corps. With GPS, I don't use it anymore but it sure can be seen a couple miles off.
Loyal, post: 451052, member: 228 wrote: I can't speak to the S7 question, I have no idea what it's "real world" capabilities are.
My longest EDMI "shot" was something just over 206,000 ft. (a Utah Peak to a Wyoming Peak) back in ~1983 with Cubic Electro Tapes.
My longest LASER "shot" was probably somewhere between 55,000 & 60,000 ft. out in Nevada somewhere using an AGA Model 78 in the late 80s or early 90s.
20-30 thousand foot shots were so routine back in those days, that I never though much about it.
Loyal
And winding up sets of angles from a backsight 15,000' to a foresight 20,000'.
And not doing this at night, or flashing lights, or mirrors. It takes someone who has some skill with the instrument and a good sense of direction, but you don't really need any extraordinary measures.
We used to do this all day long, probably the most time was spent beating a bronco across the hills and plains to get to the next point.
Sometimes the sight would look like a flame, those needed to wait for the sun to begin to set or cloud cover.
standing on the corner, post: 450636, member: 8561 wrote: I need to make a 14,000' shot with an S7. I plan on using standard -30 mm prisms. Any tips or tricks that I might need to know? Should I plan on holding black cardboard behind the sight to be able to see anything?
TIA
I shot 10,000' with a VX once. I had to stay at the instrument because the radio wouldn't connect that far. 10k didn't seem to be a problem for it at all. 14K to triples wouldn't be an issue I wouldn't think.
Triple prisms give sqrt (sqrt (3))=1.32 times the distance based only on beam spreading. Atmospheric attenuation and distortions reduce the range to less than that.
I shot 14000 feet along the coast from tri station setup to tri station backsight once, the foresight was about a half mile across the cove. The backsight tripod had an orange vest over it and triples. I just aimed above the blurry orange dot. It was a TCA1102+, ATR didn't work at that range.
My guys are out there today. I asked them to pull back on the length of our cross tie. Still should be over 10,000'.
I'll keep you guys updated
Some of us old guys have probably worked off shore and taken lots of long shots both on shore and off. We always did it at dusk, dawn or at night. You could probably tape one of those atomic beam flash lights on top of a triple prism and set the light on strobe an see it at night pretty easy.
Shooting the moon is not just a move in Hearts...
[MEDIA=youtube]tL1OATdBoY8[/MEDIA]
Your comment made me think about Bart Crattie's discussion about Bilby towers at the spring TAPS conference. He said the longest observation he was aware of to have been taken from one was (I think) 120 miles. Now that's a long sight line!