Mark Armstrong, Oregon NGS advisor, invited me to help gather a data set to be used in future OPUS Projects classes. Dave Conner, Ohio NGS advisor, and Bill Stone, SW Regional NGS advisor were also on the project. We spent a week gathering static data on bench marks and horizontal control points.
I haven’t taken the OPUS Projects training yet but Mark said he will be teaching several classes this Fall around Oregon and I plan to attend.
Here are a couple pictures from the field.
Great pictures. Thanks for sharing.
I took the class in late May. It is a great class. I haven't had the opportunity yet to actually put a project together, but I will be starting one next week that will probably have a lot of points that I will be incorporating into a project.
I am looking forward to it.
I have no doubt that you're diligent in your work, but I still cringe when I see an antenna set up on a bench mark using a conventional tripod. The cost of a fixed-height tripod is small compared to a botched HI in a vertical project. (The only thing worse than having to reobserve due to an HI uncertainty is having a bad HI and not knowing it.)
:good:
:good:
I can dig out some photos of benches than cannot have a full 2m fixed height over them. We have one variable fixed height tripod for these beauties.
Yeah Jim
I hear ya. All the rest of the occupations were with fixed ht. quad pods like in the picture with the truck in the background. When we used a slip leg the ht was read by two different people then compared. This particular station was previously observed twice with a quad pod. We had to do an unscheduled extra observation here because one of the observations was corrupted somehow. We were using brand new X90-OPUS receivers. The problem has been reported to Mark Silver and the problem receiver will be returned to him for analysis.
It was a fun project and I feel honored to have been included.
Hi John,
Nice pictures, Oregon looks great with all the pine trees!
Hope you had a lot of fun toghether.
Thanks for sharing.
Christof.
Antenna heights are always a problem in GPS surveys. We have sole Leica GPS Receivers. When you are setting them up, they ask you if you are on a pole or a tripod. Some of the guys have trouble understanding that our 2 meter fixed height tripods are a pole and sometimes call them a tripod, causing the software to add 36 cm to the antenna height to account for the height hook. It is pretty easy to figure out what went wrong when you have a height of antenna of 2.360 what has happened, but when the antenna height is 1.860, as in an adjustable fixed height set on the 1.5 meter setting plus 36 cm, you have to be on your toes to catch it. The picture of the set up tipped me off to that the one time that I know it has happened.
We just purchased our second X90 OPUS and we will be using them on height mod type surveys in the future, along with the Leicas. We have 4 old 2 meter fixed height tripods, and 4 of the Heavy Duty Adjustable Fixed Height Tripods. Most of the guys prefer the heavy duty models.
This is the picture that saved the session.
Hers is a nice vista
RV 194, SE Missouri
RP 05, SE Missouri Height Mod Station
Christof
Good to hear from you. You are right that we have some very pretty countryside. However, there are some large areas that have suffered many years of insect kill leaving the area very dry in the summer. Because of that, there have been many large fires as the picture below shows. After the fire consumes all the vegetation, there is a lot of erosion. 
