What's in Your Gun?
I would wager that all modern total stations measure in meters and the data collector or controller converts to whatever you want to see.
The difference between the two when using state plane coordinates is about 13' in CA.
US "Survey" or INTERNATIONAL FOOT
My first 6 years of 'surveying' were primarily range layout and fire control. Everything was mils and meters. 1 mil equals 1 meter at a thousand meters. I ran a 4 gun crew without a calculator. Of course I had a 40 by 100 meter kill radius...
Like most of the civilised world, Australia uses the Metric system.
US "Survey" or INTERNATIONAL FOOT
The 2007 POB article is out of date. As I noted previously all but 4 states have defined a specific foot conversion - 6 use International the other 40 use the U.S. Survey Foot. All 46 of these were defined either as part of the state legislation detailing NAD 83 and the geometric parameters of for SPCs or by publication of a notice in the Federal Register. Keeping track of this was one of my functions at NGS before I retired. NGS publishes both meters and feet for these states, the other 4 get metric values only.
It is a 3-4 foot shift east here.
US Survey Ft ACAD Civil 3D Coordinates in .FBK
While the difference between US Survey Feet and International Feet is small in typical measured distances, it can be substantial when dealing with grid coordinates.
Be careful that any .fbk raw data files you import into ACAD Civil3D which may contain coordinate values include the header information USFOOT (if you are using USFOOT), otherwise Civil3D will see it as Intl Feet and mysteriously "shift" (reconvert) your imported coordinate values to the proper coordinate system when processing the .fbk file.
Another survey crew reported they missed my primary control by 7 feet...initially suspected vandalism. But eventually discovered that was the shift between USFOOT state plane coordinates and INTL FEET state plane coordinates.;-) 😉
Their raw data had contained some starting coordinates that imported with INTL FEET.
Thanks and regards,
Mike Moran
Don't know about the law, but I've always used U.S. feet in AK.
-JD-
US Survey Ft ACAD Civil 3D Coordinates in .FBK
Mike,
That's a good point about Fieldbook Files in C3D.
Dave
In my geographic area there's an urge to use metric as it is "fashionable".
Then one turns to the real estate section of the paper and not one property is listed in metric units !
Metric is a 'crude' unit at two places of decimals.
Imperial isn't.
My $ 0.02 worth.
YOS
TNAI
US "Survey" or INTERNATIONAL FOOT
> Tradition’s strangle hold can be tenacious.
To the Jacobin tradition's grip may be a strangle hold; to the Jacobite it's a warm embrace. 😉
US "Survey" or INTERNATIONAL FOOT
:good:
Don't get me started Schrock
One of these days when I have some free time I'm going to form The Society for Anachronistic Metrology and you're going to get an honorary charter membership 😉
What's in Your Gun?
I,
I've never thought about it before, but can you set an old gun to Metric and have the data collector choose what units to use? I haven't used any of the "modern" guns, and I'm a little behind the times on data collectors, too.
Dave
> Just another reason to work in metric
>
> I used to think that also.
I refuse to believe that anything good, useful, or just came out of the French Revolution.
Don't get me started Fleming
I just measure to the nearest barleycorn.
US Survey Ft ACAD Civil 3D Coordinates in .FBK
That problem might disappear in the next version of Civil3d. There was a question asked in the beta testing users group about whether the factory default settings for the software should be changed to US Survey feet. I believe that the idea had a lot of support.
Here is a link to the surveyor's story:
and one from scientist crowd:
...And as the heavy duty mechanic used to say jokingly "when I talk with the ladies, I use metric..." 😉
What's in Your Gun?
For the purposes of programming , metric would be so much easier to utilize.
Was there ever a US made total station ? I think they were all made overseas, where metric is the standard anyway .
US "Survey" or INTERNATIONAL FOOT
But 1 mil also equals 1 foot at 1000'. Or 1 mil equals 1 mile at 1000 miles. The purpose of mils is to keep it simple for military in that the ratio of distance to left or right is 1000 to 1.
And by the way - that's approximate. Not quite perfect, but within tolerance of your kill radius.
Interesting articles, it's odd that metric wasn't used for the entire navigation process.
$300Million just to convert the software to metric?
No wonder they didn't do it!
DOT estimated a 15% cost increase to do a job in metric compared to using feet for the same job, which is the main reason metric was discontinued. But they are saying a 50% increase for the job and that's just for software. That must be for the build too.
