land survey

[+red ink]

I was told you can do a land survey with a gpsr' I have garmin etrex vista cx, there is nothing in manual

about it ,i'm not for sure what a land survey is, but i beleive it has to do with triangulation

[+Airmapper]

You can estimate your acreage, or get a good idea of the way your land looks on a map using GPS. However it is by no means accurate enough to be considered a real survey.

 

What you can do is find the corners and other boundaries of your property, and mark their position as accurately as possible by averaging the coordinates you collect while at them. Then you can load all those points into a mapping or GIS program, and "connect the dots" to get an area measurement and overlay it onto a map.

 

I have used my GPS for this a couple times and compared it with the surveyors plat, and found it to be accurate enough for general reference purposes.

[+Confucius' Cat]

To me it would depend on what you intend to do with the survey. If you are just "academically" interested in some boundaries or land measurements it would be OK but...

 

With a published accuracy +- 3 metres, I certainly wouldn't use it to build a fence between mine and my neighbours' property.

 

For the money you'll end up spending on the lawyer(s) that you'll likely need after you rely on your amateur survey, you coulda hired a whole team of surveyors.

 

I guess it would come under the heading of "pay me now or pay me later." Usually "later" means "more."

[+uxorious]

A few years ago I got a survey done on my property. The surveyor found the original stakes that another surveyor had put in. (The stakes were iron rods of some kind.)

 

I didn't have a GPS unit back then. Now if I ever wanted a survey of another piece of property and could get the coordinates, I would use the GPS to see if I could find the existing corners first. (Two corners of my property are in the woods, and the other two are in the creek. Hard to find by just looking. )

[+J-Way]

You can do an official boundary survey with a GPSr... but not with your eTrex. Surveyors use units costing many thousands of dollars that use complex waypoint averaging to determine locations to a fraction of a inch.

 

The typical method is to set one reference receiver on a known point (like a nearby USGS benchmark), then set separate receivers on each corner or other point of interest. The reference instrument is to spot any temporary deviations (atmospheric, orbit error, etc.). For example if the reference reciever indicates an error of 3.45 inches off the known point, then all points taken at the same time are adjusted by this amount.

 

They'll stay there for some time, usually several hours, to precisely pinpoint the location. If you have more points than receivers, then you leave the reference receiver in place and move the others around every few hours.

 

But if you just want to find your property lines, then you can probably use your hand-held to approximately locate the corners like Airmapper said. Corners are often marked using 1/2" steel rods driven into the ground, so a metal detector may be useful.

[+StarBrand]

Some units have an "area" function that allows you to walk around the perimeter of something and it will show the area of the inclosed boundary.

 

My etrex blue Legend does that used a few times around my block and around a football fielid and then once to walk around an irregular shaped property to give a guy an estimate of its acreage.

[+Wayfinders]

I was told you can do a land survey with a gpsr' I have garmin etrex vista cx, there is nothing in manual

about it ,i'm not for sure what a land survey is, but i beleive it has to do with triangulation

 

The best way to do this is to call a Professional Land Surveyor, ask him for the coordinates of his office, plug them into your garmin and follow the arrow to his place of business. There you can discuss price.

 

If you just want to FIND your corners you would need their state plane coordinates converted to Lat / Long. And that's only if your survey is recent and in that system. Even then, you are assuming the marker you may find to be correct. Depending on what you're doing, that could be a dangerous and costly assumption.

 

Even IF you had an expensive professional quality GPS receiver, YOU could not do an land survey. Only a professionally licensed Surveyor can do that.

 

I'm not trying to be a wise guy here......I've seen people try the very same thing and fail miserably. On the other hand, I did make money resolving the errors

[+Renegade Knight]

I was told you can do a land survey with a gpsr' I have garmin etrex vista cx, there is nothing in manual

about it ,i'm not for sure what a land survey is, but i beleive it has to do with triangulation

...If you just want to FIND your corners you would need ...coordinates. ...Even then, you are assuming the marker you may find to be correct....

 

Trimmed out the extra bits. Wayfinders is right. What you are limited too is finding your property boundary plus or minus the GPS accuracy. If you have the legal description and it was written by a good surveyor...you will have better luck tracing your boundary in the field with your GPS than if it was written by a lawyer. The key and the hard part is figuring out what the coordinates for your property corners.

 

If you can do the math, you can figure it out from your legal description, IF the section corners (Western US) or othe reference point (Eastern US) are known. For example on the Benchmarking site, or a county/city/state list.

 

I would trust a GPS to give me a good idea of the lay of the land. If I then needed a more accurate survey, that's when you drive to your land surveyors office and talk $.