Newbie Help

[+Team Coleman]

Hi Everyone.

 

I'm in a pinch and need some help. My questions may be elementary, so please forgive me in advance.

 

I'm working on a project in Arizona with a developer and there are a series of buttes that are in the middle of a 3500 acre master planned community. I'm a landscape architect and the developer would like me to map out a series of hiking trails on these buttes that they can build for the future homeowners.

 

I've started with my handheld gps and mapped out a series of waypoints of where I think a trail would most easily fit. I found a benchmark in concrete in a boulder outcropping on the butte and was hoping I could find it's NGS coordinates to compare to my own to get a better sense of accuracy.

 

There are 2 numbers on the bench mark. The first was R373 and under that was 1967 (I assume that was the year it was placed). Now how do I go about looking that up and finding it's PID?

 

I have an engineer talking to the survey dept for the developer to get me the lat/long for a known point in the development about 3/4 a mile away. Once I get that, I can then plot the known coordinates and the coordinates I got for the benchmark in my autocad drawing and lay the trail on the butte in my drawing. However, they're being a bit snobbish about helping me because my etrex isn't as accurate as their machines and the developer isn't ready to have them go out and map it out until I get a little further along.

 

I've put the trail on the drawing just by "eyeballing" it and I'm close, but a little off, enough to make me frustrated. I was hoping I could use the benchmark to speed things up a bit. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Boyd

[+Black Dog Trackers]

Team Coleman -

 

I used this page to look for your R373 and could not find anything in Arizona for either "R 373" or "R373" or "373". It could be that:

1. The designation is actually something like R873 or some such.

2. The mark is not in the database.

#2 is the most likely since there are MANY marks not included in the database.

 

Chances are more than 50% than R373 is an elevation control and if so, it's lat-lon coordinates will be up a few hundred feet off, and therefore of no use to you. (It would then have an elevation that is extremely accurate.)

 

If you can plot your trail with your etrex, its coordinates should be within about 15 feet of the true value, possibly good enough for a rough idea of a trail. I have no idea of the accuracy your trail project requires.

[+4leafclover]

I tried looking up "R373" in Arizona, and got no results.

 

could you post the co-ordinates that you took for it? A user can search the database by co-ordinates. Perhaps, if it's in the gc.com database, either you, or one of us could locate it for you.

[+Black Dog Trackers]

If you could provide us with your etrex's coordinate reading of anywhere within a mile of R373, we'd have a better chance of getting past any problem with case #1. You could of course use the page I referenced yourself.

Edited January 19, 2006 by Black Dog Trackers