At the ESRI/ACSM show last year, Carlson showed off a new product. I do not know if it has a real name, but it's a Total Station on a Stick. It's a section of a rod with a little box on it. The box can rotate horizontally and vertically. It has communication with the data collector and the cross hairs are on the screen. It has reflectorless to shoot a distance.
Bruce Carlson setup on a random point and shot two points, then he resected off the two points and was off by 0.08' from the original point. Not too bad for an engineer turned software engineer.
I would not run a traverse off this gizmo, but I would locate trees, fences, and other site features. I would even locate building corners provided I tagged enough for redundancy to compensate for the obvious potential errors in the RTK shot and the gizmo itself.
The way it locates buildings and poles, taking multi points, and doing a bearing bearing, and checking the roundness of a pole, and calcing the radius is fantastic. I imagine this will be built into a traditional total station software soon by carlson it it will pulse the distances.
Overall a neat idea. Make everything smaller, lighter and better - makes me (but not the pocketbook) happy.
The fact they are marketing it as a GIS product makes me think it's probably not up to survey grade when it comes to angle measurements. Seems like it would be a great tool for utility GIS work.
Good Luck trying to hit anything further than 50'. I would imagine trying to sight that thing would be pretty tough any further than that.
I think I found an advertisement for Jose on a stick. When they make these in Mehico...
Mascot maybe..
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