Why bother putting the "-" or "_"?
Agree with J.T.S and Rambleon.
I tried to differentiate but soon gave it up.
I'm a sole operator so have enough problem with myself without others in a crew!:-P
One thing to consider is using these points later.
I hate long point numbers - try inversing and typing 54568..63256 and so on. Gets tedious. Depends what you do with the data.
Alphanumeric don't sort well if at all in a sequence that plain numeric does. (Microsurvey- can't speak for Carlson)
I use Codes to better organise my points, along with Layers.
Biggest issue for this is what happens when you copy points to another job and suddenly a conflict arises with same Point No.
Immediately messes any tidy way of points numbered for a particular reason.
> Agree with J.T.S and Rambleon.
Same here. Star*Net doesn't care, AutoCAD doesn't care, so I don't care either. The one concession I make to point number segregation is a propensity to start my precalculated search point numbers with 1, then start my field points at the next available "1" point, e.g. if my search points are 1 through 42, I'll start my field points at 51 instead of at 43. There's nothing magic about that, it's just habit.
I do a lot of topos that end up with several thousand field points, so on a typical job I might have control points numbered 21, 22 (the first field "2" point is usually a fictitious backsight), 23 (the real in-the-ground backsight), 57, 548, 932, 2412, and 4281. F2F will put them all on the CONTROL layer, which is all the segregation I need. (Star*Net will also list the control points -- which I distinguish from sideshots by using M records rather than SS records in the raw data file -- in numerical order at the top of the export list, then put all the sideshots afterward.)
I will skip a few numbers to make my stakeout points easier for a field crew (when i have one). If 134 is my last number, I will start the stakeout at 150...but then I go and screw that all up by packing the point numbers when I see a gap in the file. One of the reasons, I use this scheme is that large files with gaps seem to still slow down my d/c..
I don't like multiple gaps in my point numbers. I like to have things sequential is at all possible. The large gap between collected points and calculated points is pretty easy to deal with, at least for me.
We use a block of points for hubs, and a block for sideshots.
I did have an issue years back with a junior chief and a new instrument man where they would screw up the point numbers bad. I told them to run them sequentially and I'd figure it out. When they got better at their jobs, they got the blocks and have had no issues since other than the occasional hiccup.
Good responses and ideas here on the beerleg
From the HP48 days anything other than sequential numbers ate the memory capacity of the collector. For example, a file containing two points numbered 1 and 5000 would be the same size as a file with 5000 points. This condition may have set me in my ways but I see several post above worth taking a look at to see if I can be changed.
Years ago back when I was a rod man, we were working on a project across the street from another surveyor's house. We had a control point about 30 feet away from his house. The instrument guy put a grade stake next to the point and wrote ?243R2475A on it. He gets in the truck and says "That will get thinking what the hell" and we drove off. Had quite a chuckle back at the office.
I do a lot of combining coordinate files so there is always the problem of duplicate point numbers, but I still need to be able to relate those numbers back to the original field notes. I'll typically edit the coordinate file I desire to assimilate by opening it in excel as a .txt file and editing the point numbers there and export as a .csv. For example if I had a point #1 from a job done ten years ago and the name for the crd file for the job was 047455555 (first 2 numbers are the year, next three the service area and last five the work order #. That point then become 1_047455555. That way if I run into a problem I can track where it came from with a minimum of fuss. I can also isolate them to their own layer which makes selecting them simpler. Since all of my jobs are in a georeferenced data base, I can shorten the extension down to 1_55555 and still know exactly where it came from. This comes in real handy when manipulating thousands of points from myriad jobs done over the years that are combined into a single master crd file for a particular area that I return to over and over again.
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
Traversing through woods is an art. Spongy or swampy ground makes for poor setups and loose points. I like to cut a 3-4" dia. stob, about 2-3' long and pound it down until it's solid as rock and set my nail in that. Sometimes it also needs to be done to support the tripod legs if it's really marshy. Another trick is to cut off a 4-8" dia. tree about three feet above ground and set your nail in that sticking up 1-2" and use that for your setup. You can then use the nail with a bit of flagging on it as your backsight. Just don't confuse it with the nail you set on the previous setup! Get your tripod legs down through the root system even if you have to cut the roots out to get the legs to go down, otherwise your setup will be bouncing around all over the place as you walk around it.
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
Sometimes I need to use three letters to identify the party chief initials. The _ character ensures that the running number always starts at the 10th position. If I export the point data and the field crew doesn't want to use the full point name they can use Excel to easily strip off the first 9 characters and just use the number.