Claimjumpers

[W5FL]

That was true about GPS, but the military has finally yielded to public pressure and opened up the GPS systems to full accuracy available to you and I now. Now I am going to buy a receiver. It even reads altitude very accurately.

Our Electric Co-Op has been surveying all of their equipment and poles with GPS for the past couple of years.

 

[ejb]

Thats good news, the last GPS I bought, a few years back, still had the fuzzy accuracy, so I ended up sending it back...maybe its time to look again.

 

[Wingnut]

Alan L. ... I saw the same thing in a town in Texas where my wife bought a place. The neighbor had been using the place my wife bought to post his TV Repair business sign and was mighty perturbed that the place was bought. He was even more ticked when she had a garage built ... and said garage happened to block him from the main street even more. When I built a fence for her (this was years before we married) ... he built one right along side of mine.
People are weird!
I'm about to put up a fence here just to remind my neighbor where MY property is ... he drives over it & through it just like he owned it ... guess the 2 years that the place was vacant is still too fresh in his memory to respect our rights. I can just see his face when I drive the stakes this weekend ... heh
BTW ... when I had the survey done here 2 years ago ... I gained several feet of property ... and this giuy used the same survey markers the previous surveyor did ... art/science? Neither ... just "point and click" I think!
(I worked survey on the railroad as a kid ... and my dad was an engineer who also surveyed on the railroad for awhile ... let me tell you ... it's hard work ... but inexact at the best!) The newly released accuracy improvement of GPS should change that, though.

too bad that common sense ain't

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Talked to the resident exspurt about GPS. For what it is worth, the military allowed full unscrambled access in March of this year. GPS surveys should be accurate within centimeters (exspurt's words, not mine). I think that is like fractions of an inch. The way a survey works has something to do with post-processing. The surveyor has to have a known position to start from then takes the readings from the piece of property which includes time of reading. He then takes this data back and based on the time of the reading can download information from the internet on the satellites' positions when the reading occured. Feed this data and the data he captured at the site into a special program and the program will spit out the differentials from the known spot and all other spots the surveyor captured. This is not exactly accurate but I lost interest before we really got to the good stuff. This is basically the way it works.

 

[W5FL]

It would be interesting to find out exactly how good GPS is these days. It is good, but I don't remember it being that good. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif Maybe the difference is resolution and actual accuracy.

 

[lloydp]

I have read it went from 60.7 yards before to 7.9 yards after, I have also looked at the equipment EddieW was talking about on Magellan's web site. It is within centimeters,, but costs $10-12,000.

 

[PBMAX]

EJB, If you by one and use it a lot like we do at work keep an eye out for a message in about a year warning of low battery..WE us ours with laptops and other equip powered off the cigaret lighter(the gps that is) we use an inverter between the lighter and laptop...any way we use GAraman GPS II's and 3's.They work well but we had a couple start to go loopy.It seems some of them have a problem with a ciircuit that drains the 10yr lithium battery...WE hav had 3 so far out of 6 with this problem. Garman responded quickly by sending us replacement units with in a week...We simlpy swapped and sent back the defective ones...
We asked if we could just replace the battery but it is a permentent mount to the board and replacing it ourselves would void the warrenty....plus it would only last about another yr...I noticed when I first started using mine the numbers would always jump around when sitting still both LAT and LON and altitude..now sence the error is off it dosn't bounce aroud so much....I also notice when I first started using street atlas you would find yourself off to one side of the road on the computer screen...Now it stays on the road getting off only on occasionally in tight sharp curves. I plan to go to the markers my servaywer left for me and sit the gps right on top of each one and record the numbers. I figure it couldn't hurt...Like some already said there's always on idiot that just has to stir up trouble......

To our internet nighbor who started this one...GOOD LUCK dealing with your local numskull.....

Lil' Paul

 

[EddieW]

If somebody were shooting a nuclear missile at us they could check which side of the tree the moss was growing and get close enough./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif $10-12,000 sounds reasonable based on the charges surveyors charge. You would hope they were trying to recover some costs. To give credit (or blame) where it is due, my wife has worked on developing satellite navigation systems for about 8 years. SHe explained it a bunch better than I relayed it. I got lost right after triangulation. I call her the GPS Goddess, make all kinds of points from that. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[EBS]

Out West here a double fence resulting from a property line dispute is known as a "Devil's Fence" /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
Ed

 

[ejb]

well if the equipment cost $10-$12K, I won't be buying it anytime soon...then again, with the way technology changes so fast, the same units will probably be a radio shack next year for $199 (I know the 3 year warranty on one of my PCs I bought 37 months ago just ran out, the machine cost well over $7K at the time, and I can now buy a new one, twice as fast for $500 bucks!!)