CallawayMT

On Wednesday the 29th I was using a Trimble 5800 Receiver to finish tieing some section corners, set 3 aliquot land corners and then do a small 10 acre topo map. This RTK receiver is one of the newest survey grade receivers out on the market right now. It was running great in the morning, but around 1PM I had 8 satellites all fixed on the L2 frequency and a good configuration; I could not get the unit to initialize(which means it can not work out the amiquities to get down to survey grade accuracies). I had a known point in the field and forced initialization which did work, but the unit lost init within seconds. Normally with the circumstances involved I would have init within 10-20 seconds. As I watched the satellites being tracked, they would go up to 8 and down to 3, continuously going up and down. I was in a place where obstructions such as trees and mountains would not have been causing this. I had work to do and so I used a total station to finish out the day. I did leave my GPS running and checked on it later and it was still having proplems. So I did figure that the Solar storm was actually affecting my GPS.

I have seen so many recent posts by people in regards to NGS markers being out, lost or destroyed along with the belief that local surveyors will reset these markers. Elcamino is right on the mark as far as his comment about not notifying a local surveyor. We do use the NGS control for varying projects and do rely upon them for large and small control projects, but very few if any private surveyors and even the depleted NGS ranks do not have the resources to replace these monuments. Most when lost, destroyed or disturbed are just that "lost for our use". If we can't find one benchmark we will move on to find a different one. As far as horizontal control goes; we will generally only use "A and B" order horizontal control for our GPS projects. Most 1st and 2nd order stations have been created using conventional methods and were built on NAD 27, which have been converted to NAD 83. This value is going to be too far from the 1-2cm accuracy we are looking for in most projects. And so old flagpoles, buildings, radio masts and even old triangulation stations are generally not used with todays equipment and standards. That being said for the benefit of some who do not understand how these monuments are being used; I want to say that there is nothing better than finding the old triangulation stations that were set in years past with a great deal of sweat and pain. We do appreciate all of the work that was accomplished during vast hardships by the old time surveyors. Regards