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mloser

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Everything posted by mloser

  1. Search for Benchmap. I have used it for years.
  2. My guess is property corner.
  3. If the disks are in concrete posts by a railroad, chances are they are well off the right of way, so you should be okay (safety wise. You may still be on railroad property). All the 1930s and 1940s bench marks (elevation) that I have searched for are in the precast posts, which are about 6 inches square, like Bill93 said. I started benchmarking with just a probe and had decent luck. I added a very check metal detector that helped immensely very quickly though. A note about the rails--most of the time they can't move rails much to the side because of clearances, so they should still be very close to the original measurement. Fractional mileposts and other removed things are another issue. I have often found the bases of telegraph poles, which has helped, and if you find references to rail lengths, 36 feet is pretty standard for mid-century rail length (it fit on a flat car). If you provide some more information (PIDs, etc) we may be able to give some guidance.
  4. mloser

    Fooled me

    Foxtrot, how did you survive without one? I bought the cheapest one I could find 12 years ago and it works fine for benchmarks. (It also finds old cans really well.) My cheap one still works and it has been on lots of adventures and has been used hard. I have had to glue parts of it back on, but it still keeps working. I have to smack it to make it work every time I turn it on, but it still behaves. I recently bought a backup on Ebay. The difference is that it cost $50 instead of $35 and is black. A couple of advantages--it works, it is very light and it telescopes so that it is small enough to stick in a backpack (with the detector head sticking up) so you can carry it anywhere. Here is on on Ebay as an example. I know nothing about the seller so this is meant only as a starting point. I think Famous Trails discontinued this model a while ago. https://www.ebay.com/i/263528677883?chn=ps&dispItem=1
  5. If you can take pics of the disk out of place you can send them to Deb and she will mark it destroyed.
  6. I have seen a number of triangle markings on what was obviously a local survey. Those points might be county-placed marks (especially the one marked T103), or just something local surveyors placed while doing work. They would have marked them with a triangle because the indicate a horizontal point, just like a tri-station.
  7. I would report it destroyed to Deb Brown and ask if she wants it back. Your problem may be GETTING the disk from a souvenir hunting demo crew super!
  8. It's working. There certainly are a lot of survey mark types (although in my area we seem to only have the basics). Kayakbird--there already IS a Google Earth KMZ file implementation written by Foxtrot_xray that works very well (although the topo map feature recently broke, but is being repaired). You can find more at http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=307146
  9. Please include drill holes and bolts! Those are some of the oldest and coolest marks. You can leave out intersection stations as the NGS no longer takes reports on them, so they really don't matter.
  10. Is something broken? I get a message that says The layer, NGS_Control_View, cannot be added to the map. Earlier today I didn't get the error but just couldn't see any marks.
  11. That's sweet! I will have to play around with it a bit.
  12. Interesting! I have a few of the paper maps from way back, but this is pretty neat. I'm still not sure what to do with the data, but I will definitely take a look around.
  13. Thanks Mike! I was wondering what happened to the topo stuff you said you were working on. Computer stuff can be a lot harder than you think at the beginning.
  14. A friend's son did a similar summer job in Alaska a few years ago where he counted some sort of wildlife (salmon, I think). They seemed to have assumed he knew what he was getting into because on the first day they handed him a gun and bear repellent and said "good luck". Luckily he WAS ready for the job, and loved it!
  15. I would gladly pay $10 each for them (and would probably buy one of each at that price). I am not saying that is a fair price... just what I would easily spend. If they were $20 I would consider a few. I still may bite at the listed price, but I have to think about it a bit.
  16. I assume this is the same problem Benchmap is having with topos??
  17. If they were $10 each I would collect them all!
  18. http://www.npr.org/2016/10/11/496567104/decades-old-mystery-put-to-rest-why-are-there-xs-in-the-desert
  19. Try emailing Deb Brown at Deb.Brown@noaa.gov. She does all the entries. I know she once told me that she tended to do them in batches, and was pretty far behind. That doesn't explain why some made it in and some didn't. I wonder if there is some sort of glitch in the submission program. Chances are that the form just emails Deb and she goes from there.
  20. Blue Angel Wannabe. (It is vertical in the link!) MEL It honestly gives me a bit of vertigo to see such an obviously vertical thing horizontal! Those towers are pretty rare around here. The only ones that have survived have been repurposed. One, at a sports complex on the site of an old airport, retains its lights, but was moved when soccer fields were put in. I am sure the thousands that pass by it on a tournament weekend barely look up.
  21. How did they use it when it was sideways like that?
  22. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/18/ben_nevis_grows/
  23. Tillamurphs, You can call the USGS and request their benchmark recoveries for that area. I know they have one facility in Rolla, Missouri but think that their west coast facility is elsewhere. I got a few sets of datasheets of my area a number of years ago and used them to search for USGS marks that weren't in the NGS database. You will sometimes find the non-marked ones listed there. As Benchmark Hunter stated they are often the intersections of streets or the center of a railroad crossing, or something like "the top of the rail in front of the Marysville railroad station". As for the locations of the X's, I have found them to be fairly accurate and a good start for hunting, but not very useful without the description. They will be on the side of the road that they are indicated, for instance, but if they aren't on a bridge or other structure you will have a hard time finding them in the weeds. I have had some luck finding descriptions by searching for "Spirit leveling" and my state, and found books from the early 1900s that described some of the marks in my area. I did the same for Oregon and got this : http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0556/report.pdf, but I don't think it includes the area you want (I searched for Yachats and got nothing). You might also search Google Books for "primary traverse oregon" or "spirit leveling oregon". The USGS accepts recoveries too, although they don't have an online process. I went so far as to write down all the recoveries and never submitted them. Now I feel guilty and will have to dig them out again.
  24. It appears this monument has a history, and was used in a supreme court case to determine the Texas-Oklahoma border https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/267/452 A more in depth view of the dispute appears in The Geographical Review: http://www.jstor.org/stable/208446?seq=21#page_scan_tab_contents but more importantly there is a blurry picture of the Electra bridge on page 178. It shows a wooden structure that, once it was abandoned, would have rapidly been reclaimed by the river. At any rate, the station is first order--so it should be precisely where the coordinates say it will. Using your GPS should get you within 10 feet or so.
  25. I doubt they will "get to it". The regulars here have asked for the benchmark site to be made more of a priority in the past and have gotten nowhere. It has been years now and I think we have all given up and just use it as it exists, as well as report on the USGS site, which adds value to what we do by giving surveyors access to our recoveries. As for benchmark maps, I use Google Earth using a KML file that a member here provided. I will let him chime in if he wants anyone else to have it--he switched his development efforts to Benchmap for Android a while ago--it's a great product and he keeps adding to it. The GE KML gets a little flakey at times, mostly because the USGS site isn't available, but overall it is a great tool for doing research before heading out.
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