mloser

I actually managed to locate a copy of this book and attempted to read it. It is a very descriptive travel narrative about the west, but has next to zero triangulation information in it. He prattles on about the areas he visits, the weather, wildlife, birds, and stories from an old mountain man who killed a lot of "b'ars" and such. At any rate, if anyone wants it, just PM me and I will send it your way. It is currently on Paperbackswap.com, so if you are a member there just search for it and request it that way.

Harry, take a look at Floyd Bennett Field on Google again. They have done a lot of work around the compass rose and it looks quite different.

I read somewhere that a metal detector will find something about as deep as the coil diameter, so if you have a detector similar to mine you can go about 4 inches deep, or possibly less. I was looking for a mark that was under about 4 inches of dirt recently and failed--I had to dig until it was only about 2 inches deep. A long time ago I managed to find a mark 18 inches deep by measuring carefully and repeatedly from the reference marks. I was helped by very soft soil, but also was very lucky in that I hit the buried mark without digging a wide hole. The mark had pieces of chain on top of it for detectors that work better with iron. However, there was no mention of that in the description. Cherry Hill

http://lifehacker.com/career-spotlight-what-i-do-as-a-land-surveyor-1747354734

I have never seen one made for the purpose like this. Quite often I have come across painted crosses or painted Ts. A couple of times I found white plastic across a tri-station in a large X shape, once in great shape, a few times partly disintegrated.

I used to wonder if I would be helping anyone by painting the mark. Surveyors do this to help locate the mark, but I believe that when they mark it they are doing so as part of a project, and not as a long-term finding aid. Surveyor's paint (and ribbon) both degrade quickly when exposed to light, so the markings are just temporary. What DukeofURL01 said was my main reason for not painting the marks. I don't want to call attention to something that might be defaced or removed by a casual observer/potential thief. For hard to find marks my finding aid was to redescribe the mark as completely as possible and submit that to the NGS. One exception--I searched for some county marks near me, and with their permission painted information on nearby roads to point out the markers. This consisted of the mark name an arrow and the distance from the road, e.g. LC0180 ^ 8.2. This doesn't actually mark the disk, but helps a person who knows what to look for where to start looking. I used white field-marking paint for that, so it should last a bit longer than surveyor's paint.

Bill, I never heard of a tile probe, but after I looked them up it turns out I had almost exactly that item custom made (mine was free at least!). I always keep an eye on what could be underground. Good advice.

I like it! I may add one to my arsenal. I had a friend custom make a probe for me--a 3/8" steel bar with a short length of pipe welded across the top as a handle. It works well but is still a bit "bendy" at times so I can't force it into hard ground without making it into a curve. I had it made about 3 feet long so I can use it standing up and walking, which is great for searching for that "clink" across a wide area.

Papa-Bear! Glad to see you are still around. I may take you up on that offer to see the Randall monument next time I am in the city. There was a show about Manhattan a number of years ago that featured the city map folks "finding" one of the square bolts. I thought of you immediately and have always wanted to see it, but when you take your wife to the city it is hard to get her to crawl on boulders in Central Park. As for anyone else considering taking a day with Papa-Bear in NYC, all I can say is "do it!" I spent a great day with him in lower Manhattan looking for old marks. He is a fountain of NYC knowledge and a great co-hunter.

Excellent! I will buy it for sure.

I was also thinking of heading back to some of them. I sort of ran out of marks close to me and have to drive over an hour to just start looking, so I have not done much hunting at all lately. It has been about 10 years since I started and I might go out and look again. I am willing to bet some have disappeared.

It's not just you. I have had the same issue with one of my devices (running 4.4.2) , but not with the other (running 5.0). I have been working with Mike to send debug logs so he can find the issue. He thought he had it worked out last night and was making some program changes, so fingers crossed that it will be fixed with the next release. I will let him know you are having an issue too in case he doesn't check the board this morning.

I agree about the topo maps--having them in the beta is a terrific plus. I regularly switch between maps, topo and satellite when I am having trouble locating a mark.

What a horrid day to go hunting here in the northeast! More power to ya! I have used the current beta a number of times and really like it. My only wish would be a quick way to change from map to satellite view.

I searched a few times at that base. The first was on my own--it is mostly an open base with some restricted areas. It was only when someone saw me poking around the base of a water tower that I got stopped by MPs and questioned. They were very nice and just suggested that I tell someone what I was doing next time. I did that--I stopped at the facilities office and left my information and told them what I was doing. They were fine with it and just asked that I check in before I left. The escorted tour was different--it wasn't official military, but was with a civilian from their forestry office. He checked and got proper permission before he took me around. There were places I could never have gone without him, and one place where I couldn't have even gotten to because my car would never have made it! The last mark I saw on the base was a drive by as we went past the firing range and I leaned out the truck window. The range was in use and he said he couldn't stop at that location. It was a pretty neat day, not so much from a benchmark hunting perspective as just being in a place that civilians aren't usually allowed.

I was able to get permission to hunt for marks on the Fort Indiantown Gap, a PA National Guard facility near Lebanon, PA. It is mostly open--no fences--and I was given permission to go anywhere in the open area to hunt. There are also some protected areas and I was lucky enough to be taking a GIS class with a forestry worker from the Gap (as it is referred to locally) to get me permission to hunt in places I normally wouldn't have been allowed to go. As a bonus, he drove me to all the marks, and the day was a complete success, from a hunting, if not finding, perspective.

And as far as the NGS is concerned they no longer qualify for recovery. They do not want reports on intersection stations any more. So the only place you should record them is on this site.

Based on the description that is where I would start. It behind a fence of some sort of facility that I can't quite figure out (gas pipeline station?) so you will need permission, or the brass ones to leap over the fence and give it a whirl. Google Streets shows a small sign right about where the mark would be expected. Since, as Wister6813 said, it wasn't found twice fairly recently, it would a bit much to hope that there was a witness post right at the mark.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was just a piece of trash, but I was happy to find that a curve sign still existed and that it was about 1/10 of a mile from what I guessed to be the tangent of the curve. It would certainly be worth checking out.

I took a look at the area on Google Streets and there is still a curve sign, although it may not be in the same spot. I grabbed an image that intrigued me though. Take a look at this:

TO my wife's dismay, I constantly point out benchmarks I have hunted for as we drive places. I even watched out the window of a recent Fall rail trip to see any of the ones I spent hours looking for. She does the smart thing and just ignores me.

Grizzflyer, I think the surveying community should appreciate the work of amateurs, especially those of us who take it seriously. I try to think of it in terms of a surveyor who has to find the best bench mark to use for a project. If I find one that was difficult I am hoping that by describing it in terms of new references that I can make their job a bit easier. They don't look for these for the challenge like I do--they just need it to do their job, and the faster they can find the mark the faster they can get to the meat of what they do. (I am not saying that some surveyors don't appreciate a good bench mark hunt, but when trying to get a job done they probably just want to find it as quickly as possible). Also, I have been to many marks that have not been recovered in decades, only to find them clearly marked with surveyor's tape, and that tape isn't even faded, so that means they were used in the last year or so. Many professionals don't have time to submit recoveries, or don't make it a priority. My approach is that if there is no change in the status of the mark from the most recent recovery I will submit a recovery with no text, if it has been a few years since the last recovery--sort of saying "yeah, it's still there. You can expect to find it quickly". If something has changed I will try to totally redescribe it in relation to all references that I measure. I find it confusing to read a recovery that says "delete reference to railroad tracks, and yeah, also it is 10.5 feet from a tree...". It's much easier to find it if all the references are in one place and you don't have to refer to multiple recoveries.

You, uh, can't. Not yet. That's a feature added to the v2 beta, which he's testing at the moment. The new version is planned to offer a couple paid features (basic usage of the app, like v1, is free). The paid features will be the USGS Map Overlay (net connection required), and offline files (for viewing sheets/maps without a network connection). v2 development is on a temporary hold at the moment, as I need to add some web services to my website to handle the purchase information. I'm aiming for a release in January. Oops, my bad. When I said "look at the USGS map" I meant "too bad there is no USGS map feature! I hope he adds one by January". Aren't you selling it through the Play Store?

What Enmark said. Scaled stations can have coordinates that are off from the actual mark location, depending on how accurate and precise the scaling was done. The app only uses coordinates from NGS, so if they're location is off by 100 feet, so will the mark on the map be off. This is where reading the datasheet and description help. I recall reading in this board that scaled marks could be off as much as 600 feet based on calculations someone much smarter than I am did. I don't remember ever seeing one that far off, but 100 feet or so isn't rare. Like Foxtrot said, the datasheet is the gold standard and what you should use after his EXCELLENT app gets you close. And don't forget to use the USGS TopoQuad feature of the app--quite often you will see an X where the benchmark is located. Although it is hard to see on the map of Manhattan, KU1445 is marked exactly where it is with a nearly invisible X at the edge of the building and BM 238 to the right of it.

I did a little looking around and found a Simeon East School listed on Simeon Rd south of Valentine. Looking at Google Maps I found a sort of north-easterly bound roadish thing from there, and then going to USGS Historical Maps I found a string of survey marks along that roadway that follows Schlagel Creek. I don't have Google Earth at work so I can't easily find out about the marks along that dirt road.