!@#*!@#$$%%(*&^ Maybe if I try the John Francis method, I'll feel better.....
Just found ANOTHER glitch in the TopSURV data collection software. The site where I work on has monitoring prisms mounted on quite a few buildings, concrete structures, piers etc., for monitoring purposes during the construction phase. They make great backsights and points to resection off of. They're not moving at all and are pretty tight. My resection residuals are usually less than 10 seconds. Pretty good stuff. Many prisms have different offsets. One has a 0 mm offset, a couple have -25 mm offsets and some have -17 mm offsets etc.
The problem with TopSURV is after a while, the file seems to be corrupted. When I change the prism type-constant, it stops applying the correction. It doesn't matter if I pick a prism with a -30 mm offset or a 0 mm offset. So far the solution I have found is to start a brand new file, import my points, my alignments etc.
What PIA. This is the second time it's happened since August and I only have slightly more than 1000 points on this job.
I already know what Topcon's solution will be. "Well we have this new software out called Magnet that you can downgra.....errr....upgrade to." NFW. grrrr.....
A lot of the problems that Magnet users are having sound very similar to TopSURV's many issues. No way, no how, no DICE. Never again.
There, I feel better......
Yeah, I got bit by this too. I was happy to discover that Topsurv 8.2.2 would allow you to set different prism constants for backsight & foresight - I liked to use a 0 PC prism for the BS, and a -30 for FS. I eventually discovered that Topsurv would sometimes, but not always, use -30 for the backsight, while displaying 0 mm on the screen. I hoped this would be fixed when ver 8.2.3 was released, but no, it still switches the prism constant, but at least it would display properly on the screen.
I decided it was too dangerous to use this feature, and replaced all my prisms with nodal point prisms, and never changing the prism constant.
When I bought my QS 2 years ago, I watched the Topcon video that bragged about this being Topcon's 8th generation of robot, but I would have expected these bugs to be ironed out by now. Even my dealer mentioned that Topcon had been dragging their feet correcting bugs in their software.
I run my GPT-9003 with Carlson SurvCE on an FC-2500 and I still run into issues with prism constants. I suspect that this is a communication issue in the instrument itself. If I change the backsight prism constant prior to linking the instrument and DC, everything is usually okay. If I forget and change it after linking, you can be sure that the instrument will use the wrong p.c. for the backsight.
Interesting. I'll have to try that out tomorrow.
The thing about it is that now that I started a new file, it seems to work correctly. If I sight one of the monitoring prisms, note the slope distance, change the prism constant and then compare the new SD, it appears to be working correctly.....so far...
