Vent: I keep seeing people skip the baseline check on their total station setups

I was on a site in Phoenix last week, helping a new guy from another crew. He was setting up for a boundary survey and just leveled the instrument, shot his backsight, and started going. I asked if he checked the baseline distance between his control points, and he looked at me like I had two heads. He said he just trusts the coordinates from the data collector. I had to show him the printout from a job six months ago where that exact thing led to a 0.3-foot error over 500 feet because someone fat-fingered a coordinate entry. It's a five minute check with a tape measure that saves a whole lot of headache later. Why do you think people are so quick to skip that step? Is it just to save time?

2 comments

2 Comments

julia_hayes13d ago

Yeah, the "trusts the coordinates from the data collector" line is exactly the problem. I got burned once by a bad import from an old file. Now my rule is to always do a quick field distance between control points before I even set up the gun. It takes two minutes with a disto or a tape. If the numbers don't match what's in the file, you know right away something's off. It's saved my butt more than once from chasing errors all day.

hugo_coleman2813d ago

Sounds like a good way to catch a bad datum.