NGS Program for Control Information

[+Black Dog Trackers]

It works just fine here. It's a good program!

 

The links of course point to realtime datasheets.

I saw a couple of 2007 recovery notes in a quick look in Fairfax County, Virginia, but I don't know the date of the PID list that it uses. I presume it is also realtime, but I'm not sure.

 

rtreit, if you like Google Earth, you could try ngsread. It makes a .kml file for Google Earth from NGS county or state archives. The popups include all the recovery notes.

 

I compared DSWORLD and ngsread with Fairfax County and noticed that DSWORLD included a whole new series of marks like this one. The mark was monumented in 2005 but wasn't in the 2006 county archive. Not particularly surprising, but it was interesting that it was part of a whole group of marks.

 

The comparison was also interesting because it showed how this station had moved, I guess as part of the GPS adjustment.

 

Yikes; waitaminute! I think something's wrong with the plotting of DSWORLD. Station Disco Dan with ngsread puts the pin icon directly on one of those plastic Y-shapes, clearly visible on the ground, but DSWORLD's icon is about 86.5 feet off (using the GE ruler). It's true that the adjusted coordinates are different, but only in the 0.001 second position. It looks to me like DSWORLD is plotting with values rounded to the nearest second. Well, that should't be very hard to fix.

[+rtreit]

 

rtreit, if you like Google Earth, you could try ngsread. It makes a .kml file for Google Earth from NGS county or state archives. The popups include all the recovery notes.

 

Thanks, this is very cool. I've been using bmgpx and then loading the GPX file in Google Earth, but NGSREAD is better. The color coding is a real time saver, and I love that it has the links to both the actual datasheet and geocaching.com.

 

I wonder if the FAQ could be updated with a section on using Google Earth that summarizes some of the great tools available...

 

rtreit

[+Black Dog Trackers]

rtreit -

 

Yes, I think that would be good. In my opinion, the best approach might be to start doing that in holograph's Benchmark Hunting Wiki, and get the authors to do some feature lists, pros, cons, and descriptions of the programs there first, then get it in the FAQ here in the next revision (whenever that is). Besides dsworld, bmgpx, and ngsread, there is monkeykat's Benchmark Viewer and foxtrot_xray's NGS>GPX program, and perhaps others.

 

I would suggest broadening the scope from just Google Earth to all mapping resources for which benchmark software has been developed. For instance, Google Earth and Google Maps are sufficiently different that people use them for benchmark maps in completely different ways.

[TillaMurphs]

 

MRAS I downloaded it installed it and can not get it to work.

 

I looked for a tutorial but did not find anything.

 

Any Help out here???

I trial-and-errored with this and got most of it to work (the Help menu was not really appropriately named for figuring out the basics).

 

I am assuming you are able to start it up and see the turquoise dialog box for DSWorld?

 

If so, the quickest way to see something is to

- Click on Stations

- Click on “By State and County”

- Use the pull down arrow to select a state.

- Then use the pull down arrow to select a county

- Then click on the blue NGS icon

 

Now it will automatically open Google Earth and display points in the selected county.

 

For some fill-in boxes, if you let your cursor hover over the white part of the box it will provide you with an example format of the what it is expecting (such as in the Latitude or Longitude boxes for the "Everything" option).

 

(If you figure out how to view by "PROJECT ID:", let me know - that option still has me puzzled.)

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

 

MRAS I downloaded it installed it and can not get it to work.

 

I looked for a tutorial but did not find anything.

 

Any Help out here???

I trial-and-errored with this and got most of it to work (the Help menu was not really appropriately named for figuring out the basics).

 

I am assuming you are able to start it up and see the turquoise dialog box for DSWorld?

 

If so, the quickest way to see something is to

- Click on Stations

- Click on “By State and County”

- Use the pull down arrow to select a state.

- Then use the pull down arrow to select a county

- Then click on the blue NGS icon

 

Now it will automatically open Google Earth and display points in the selected county.

 

For some fill-in boxes, if you let your cursor hover over the white part of the box it will provide you with an example format of the what it is expecting (such as in the Latitude or Longitude boxes for the "Everything" option).

 

(If you figure out how to view by "PROJECT ID:", let me know - that option still has me puzzled.)

 

Yes I did that it loads and it does not open GE 5.0.

 

I tried to reinstall it again and still no worky.

 

Probably me.

I am a computer dummy on some things.

 

Try this one for an ID.

IDAHO FBN, 1999 (GPS-1377)

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

I told ya I was a

 

DuH ME!!!

 

I found the problem.

 

In case someone else may run across this for some reason my files from the program are stored within the

DSWorld file.

 

I have to open it out of that file from GE.

 

Problem solved.

 

Edit:

While I was searching I also found one for those of you who are covered by the PLSS.

 

PLSS in GE

Edited March 11, 2009 by GEO*Trailblazer 1

[MRAS]

DSWorld 2.04 is now available from:

 

www.ngs.noaa.gov/PC_PROD/PARTNERS/index.shtml

 

Be sure to uninstall your old version before installing the new.

 

To plot publishable marks, start the program and click 'Stations>By State and County'. Next, select the state and then the county. You can use the defaults for Type and Stability. Then click the NGS symbol. The program will go to NGS's website and retrieve a 'PID list', generate the .kml file, and bring up GoogleEarth with all of the points plotted.

 

If you want to plot everything in a 1-mi radius, including non-publishable marks, click 'Everything' and enter the latitude and longitude and then click the NGS symbol. Ex: N382203 W0753539

[MRAS]

For the PROJECT ID option, you need to know the NGS project accession number under which the survey was done. For instance, if you want to view all of the bench marks that were found and set as part of a recent survey at BWI airport, you can enter the project ID L27001.

[+m&h]

The following url provides a window in which you can enter a single PID and discover what project or projects it has been part of. At the moment, for repeated use it seems best to bookmark it, because the back button, at least on Safari, doesn't take us back to the window from a project list.

http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/SURV_ID/mark_sources.prl

[+Black Dog Trackers]

MRAS -

 

Did you see the last paragraph of my March 9 message above?

 

Did anyone else notice the issue? You can see the white triangle where the marker is very well by putting this

N 38 40 45.75680 W 077 14 58.50337

in the Google Maps search box.

DSWORLD puts its icon for the station here:

N 38 40 45. W 077 14 58.

(decimal parts cut off)

[+billwallace]

I have seen location descrepancies with DSWorld (2.01) KML points, especially RMs.

For example:

FV0168 and its RMs (FV0169 and FV0170) - The RM's should be approx 180 degrees apart and on either side of the station but the DSWorld KML shows them ~20 degrees apart and both Northeast of the station. The station position also is a bit off.

 

I thought this was curious and maybe it has been discussed on a thread that I haven't seen yet.

[+Black Dog Trackers]

billwallace -

 

The reference-mark-with-a-PID thing is a different situation. The RMs' PIDs almost always have SCALED coordinates - they might be OK, and they might not. I've seen cases in which all RMs have the same (wrong) coordinates.

Some programs look into the box score to rectify this problem since the box score information plus the coordinates of the parent tri-station together provide more accuracy. I know that both NGSREAD and NGS>GPX programs do this. (See the March 10 message for their URLs.) I don't know about other programs.

 

As far as the DSWORLD apparent cut-off of decimal points, station SANTA F happens to not have large decimal portions.

[+billwallace]

Some programs look into the box score to rectify this problem since the box score information plus the coordinates of the parent tri-station together provide more accuracy

Ahhh... thank you, I guess I should have looked closer. I use NGS>>GPX and I see that it has given more accurate locations for the RM's than are in the actual datasheet. Bet I read that once and promptly forgot it.

[MRAS]

Yikes; waitaminute! I think something's wrong with the plotting of DSWORLD. Station Disco Dan with ngsread puts the pin icon directly on one of those plastic Y-shapes, clearly visible on the ground, but DSWORLD's icon is about 86.5 feet off (using the GE ruler). It's true that the adjusted coordinates are different, but only in the 0.001 second position. It looks to me like DSWORLD is plotting with values rounded to the nearest second. Well, that should't be very hard to fix.

 

DSWorld 2.04 has two ways of plotting marks. The first way is by 'Stations' which will plot all publishable marks for a county, project, or area. This procedure uses an NGS .prl script to create an output currently rounded to the nearest second of lat/lon (+- 100 ft). DSWorld then uses this output to plot the points in Google Earth.

 

The second way, 'Everything', plots every mark in the NGS IDB within a 1-mile radius of the specified Lat/Lon, including publishable marks, reference marks, azimuth marks, calibration baseline marks, destroyed marks, temporary marks, etc. to whatever precision is in the NGS IDB for that mark. This does not include a computed position to an RM via the 'box score info'. The 'Everthing' procedure uses a different NGS servlet which returns the most accurate position for the point from the IDB, but is limited to a 1-mile radius from a given Lat/Lon.

 

Note also that Google Earth aerial photography can be quite accurate in some areas of the country (+- 10 ft) or rather inaccurate in some areas (+-150 ft). To test the accuracy of the photography, get a hand-held position to a photo-identifiable point such an intersection, water tank, church spire, etc. and see where that appears in Google Earth.

 

Once you recover an NGS mark and get a hand-held position on it, I can get the NGS IDB position upgraded. I typically submit a file of marks to NGS once a month.

[+Black Dog Trackers]

DSWorld 2.04 has two ways of plotting marks. The first way is by 'Stations' which will plot all publishable marks for a county, project, or area. This procedure uses an NGS .prl script to create an output currently rounded to the nearest second of lat/lon (+- 100 ft). DSWorld then uses this output to plot the points in Google Earth.

The "rounded to the nearest second of lat/lon (+- 100 ft)" is the issue.

Not only is it +-100 ft. even for adjusted marks, it appears to be simply truncated, not rounded.

It looks like it might be good if NGS did a re-look at their perl script.

 

Testing truncation versus rounding, I plotted the rounded (to the nearest second) values for the Disco Dan station:

N 38 40 46 W 077 14 59

puts a mark 47 ft. NW of Disco Dan's white marker, nearer the woods.

That is closer than where the NGS .prl script's values put it (apparently) at:

N 38 40 45 W 077 14 58

which is 86 feet SE of the white marker on the ground.

 

The second way, 'Everything' ... uses a different NGS servlet which returns the most accurate position

That one certainly does use the whole adjusted values. It puts its green dot right on Disco Dan's white marker!

(Apparently Google Earth (and Google Maps) is pretty accurate around there.)

[MRAS]

Good news!

 

NGS has improved the .prl script that provides the positional information for each mark. The lat/lon will now be to whatever precision is in the NGS IDB. For Horizontal Control, this will be to 5 decimals. For Vertical Control, it will be to the nearest second, 0.1 second, or 0.01 second.

 

To take advantage of the improved precision, you need to get DSWorld V 2.05 available from:

 

www.ngs.noaa.gov/PC_PROD/PARTNERS/index.shtml

[+billwallace]

Once you recover an NGS mark and get a hand-held position on it, I can get the NGS IDB position upgraded. I typically submit a file of marks to NGS once a month.

File format?? csv with PID, Lat, Lon??

[MRAS]

File format?? csv with PID, Lat, Lon??

 

The easiest way to send me bench marks positions is in .gpx format. After you capture the position as a waypoint, enter the PID for the mark name and the designation for the description. When you have positioned a number of them, download them to your PC and export the data as a .gpx file. Send the .gpx file as an attachment to:

 

marchershee@gmail.com

[starmanjer]

Malcolm,

 

Having a little trouble getting DSWorld to work on my laptop @ home. It's a Vista 64 bit.(sucks)

DSWorld didn't start up GE.

I've reinstalled GE & DSWorld to the Programs files folder (not x86 per vista defaults)

Now DSW starts GE, but GE says it can't read the file "MD_Baltimore_X-0-0.kml".

 

I've also downloaded GETHVLIST, but haven't had time to use it yet.

 

any suggestions

 

Thanks,

 

Jerry

[MRAS]

DSWorld V 2.07 is now available from NGS:

 

http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PC_PROD/PARTNERS/index.shtml

 

What's New:

 

Version 2.07

Automatic .gpx and SA file creation added

Edit Photo has been added.

Submit Photo has been added

Submit recovery web page link added

Submit .gpx file procedure added

Submit hand held GPS position procedure added

 

Version 2.06

The program has been made 'Vista friendly'.

'State and County' has been added to the 'Everything' menu item.

The 'Projects' menu item will now retrieve project information for GPS and Triangulation/Traverse projects.

 

Be sure to uninstall the old version of DSWorld before installin the new!

[+chiknlips45]

I downloaded the new program and experienced several problems after the required reboot to finish the install. Norton anti-virus reported having the wrong version of internet explorer (Ver 5) and would not run. Internet Explorer would not start at all. I could double click the icon but nothing happened. Finally, I received an "ordinal 481 not found in eirtutil.dll" error when trying to do a system restore to undo the damage incurred above. When my computer boots it uses the above .dll and will not allow overwriting, deleting or editing of the file. Finally after ignoring the ordinal 481 error and continuing with system restore anyway, I was able to get my system back in order. Downloader beware!!

[MRAS]

I downloaded the new program and experienced several problems after the required reboot to finish the install. Norton anti-virus reported having the wrong version of internet explorer (Ver 5) and would not run. Internet Explorer would not start at all. I could double click the icon but nothing happened. Finally, I received an "ordinal 481 not found in eirtutil.dll" error when trying to do a system restore to undo the damage incurred above. When my computer boots it uses the above .dll and will not allow overwriting, deleting or editing of the file. Finally after ignoring the ordinal 481 error and continuing with system restore anyway, I was able to get my system back in order. Downloader beware!!

 

What version/date of ieframe.dll and msinet.dll do you have on your system, and what OS are you running?

Edited September 10, 2009 by MRAS

[+chiknlips45]

I downloaded the new program and experienced several problems after the required reboot to finish the install. Norton anti-virus reported having the wrong version of internet explorer (Ver 5) and would not run. Internet Explorer would not start at all. I could double click the icon but nothing happened. Finally, I received an "ordinal 481 not found in eirtutil.dll" error when trying to do a system restore to undo the damage incurred above. When my computer boots it uses the above .dll and will not allow overwriting, deleting or editing of the file. Finally after ignoring the ordinal 481 error and continuing with system restore anyway, I was able to get my system back in order. Downloader beware!!

 

What version/date of ieframe.dll and msinet.dll do you have on your system, and what OS are you running?

 

ieframe.dll date 7/19/2009 file ver 7.0.6000.16890, msinet.dll not found, running XP with SP3 and IE ver 7.0.5730.13. Hope this helps.

[+jwahl]

Since someone else verified it DSWORLD has had that truncate to the nearest second since inception. That is not too useful to have every station misplotted. So glad it is fixed but am irritated that it was that way to begin with. Wrote my own program.

 

However I cannot test any new version of DSWORLD since the setup.exe wants to update files on my machine, without telling me what. To tell the truth that type of install behaviour makes me pretty nervous. I haven't had any trouble installing any other windows applications. It harkens back to the day when everyone's apps install their own DLL's and that is fine for them but then 5 other apps quit working.

 

- jlw

Edited September 11, 2009 by jwahl

[MRAS]

Found the problem. The install program wanted to update the ieframe.dll file, which is part of Windows Explorer 8.0, and is not backwardly compatable with IE 7.0. Apparently Microsoft made some major changes to ieframe.dll from V 7 to V 8.

 

The remaining .dll files that get installed have been around a while and are time-tested. It is likely that if any of these files already exist on your machine, the ones on your machine will be newer. If asked during installation, always keep your existing .dll files. To see what files are to be installed, you can open the SETUP.LST file with notepad.

 

In any case, I have re-created the install without the ieframe.dll file and tested it on Windows XP and Vista. The good version has been posted on NGS's website and is 2.07.01.

 

In regards to the truncaiton issue, the program will now retrive (and has since V 2.05 - see my post of April 2009) the postions of marks to whatever precision is in the NGS IDB. For horizontal control points, this will be to 5 decimal places. For most vertical control, this will be a scaled position (nearest second), unless a hand held or adjusted postion has been submitted for the point.

[+Black Dog Trackers]

I went to the source website for DSWORLD today. The website has only version 2.06. I noticed that I had version 2.05, so I downloaded and installed version 2.06 from the website today with no problems whatsoever. I rum windows xp here.

 

The program works fine. The locations indicated by icons on the Google Earth map are correct.

 

The only issue I have with it is that a few of the stations have duplicate labels and 2 kinds of icons superimposed.

[MRAS]

If the point is both a horizontal and vertical control, both a square and a triangle will plot for the same point. You can turn off all horizontal by unchecking the horizontal folder, or turn off all vertical by unchecking the vertical folder. This feature was requested by NGS personnel.

[MRAS]

DSWorld V 2.08 is now available from NGS:

 

http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PC_PROD/PARTNERS/index.shtml

 

With this version you can submit hand-held GPS positions of bench marks to their new ftp site.

[+billwallace]

MRAS

I'm finally going to get around to submitting coordinates that I have for scaled vertical control - using the DSWORLD Submit .gpx file option.

 

I'm going to write a GSAK macro to spit out this file so I want to be sure of the gpx format - particularly the latitude and longitude since it looks like the gpx spec is decimal degrees. PID goes in the <name> element and designation goes in the <desc> element. Here is what I think I need:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<gpx xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1" version="1.1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1 http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1/gpx.xsd">
 <wpt lat="35.7097980" lon="-120.3045680">
<name>AA4372</name>
<desc>C 617 RESET</desc>
 </wpt>
</gpx>

Anything else?

It might be useful to include a gpx file example in the help file.

 

Thnx

[MRAS]

The latest version of DSWorld automatically creates a .gpx file when you retrive the data for a county. Look in your 'C:\Documents and Settings\USERID\Application Data\DSWorld\' directory.

Be sure to change the sign of the longitude for a positive West longitude and round off lat & lon seconds to 1 decimal after converting to DMS.

[+billwallace]

hmmm...

so I looked at the file you mentioned

The latest version of DSWorld automatically creates a .gpx file when you retrive the data for a county. Look in your 'C:\Documents and Settings\USERID\Application Data\DSWorld\' directory.

and it also has the coordinates in decimal degrees.

 

So I guess my question is, do I post a gpx file with the coordinates in decimal degrees (per the gpx spec) or post it with coordinated in dddmmss.x (disregarding the spec). And, if the answer is decimal degrees, someone will know it is from an HH2 not an HH1?

 

thnx,

I just don't want to get it wrong.

[MRAS]

I am assuming that all positions in .gpx files, which are usually from Navigation grade receivers, are HH2 positions. For marks that are positioned via GIS or Survey grade receivers, use the single-submission procedure in DSWorld.

[MRAS]

Attention Benchmarkers:

 

DSWorld V 2.09 is now on the NGS website for download.

 

New in Version 2.09:

A selection for displaying stations by State and Designation has been added to the main menu.

A selection for displaying OPUS DB points has been added to the main menu.

Links are available within a OPUS DB plot to retrieve OPUS DB datasheets.

The hand held position window now includes text boxes for recovery initials, date and condition.

One can now submit a request to add a new agency symbol.

DSWorld news added.

Last handheld position load viewer added.

File clean-up option added.

New photo editing tools added.

Transmission timeout setting option added.

[MRAS]

DSWorld 4.01 is now available here:

 

http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PC_PROD/PARTNERS/index.shtml