When surveyor Dale Atkinson heard of the Emlid GNSS/GPS receiver he thought “it almost sounded like a bit of a joke.” Could a receiver that affordable and compact really perform as well as claimed?
The Surveyor
Dale runs Atkinson & Booy Surveys in Townsville, Queensland. The company works mainly in cadastral surveying and a range of identification, engineering, mining, and other professional services.
The Pain
Dale states that he does a lot of work in rough areas where “you can’t get a decent vehicle in,” Dale says. Jobs require a buggy or helicopter to get to the sites for long line static surveys. He and his crew were walking up hundreds of metres in remote territory, lugging car batteries with cumbersome equipment on their backs.
In addition to the time expense and effort of setup, Dale had to deal with batteries going flat and wasting project time. Large receivers’ visibility to passing traffic in certain locations risks costly theft and further expense and delay.
The Answer
A mate told him about the Emlid Reach RS2 GNSS receiver. It can be used as an RTK unit or a static unit, and it has all the constellations. With what Dale knew about available surveying equipment it sounded too good to be true. But he bought a couple primarily as static units. They solved a lot of his problems:
- The Emlid unit is low cost and scalable. The fact that Dale could afford multiple units meant jobs got done faster.
- Each unit fits in a case about the size of a school lunchbox. “I’m taking five tomorrow in just one ute drawer,” Dale says. “A mate of mine takes 6 units for field work in just one ute drawer – It’s hard to do that with the giant padded boxes, the size of 20-litre drums, that the other receivers come in.”
- The internal battery lasts 22 hours. Dale can jump out of a chopper, set it to automatically record, and the next day pick up 22 hours of high-quality static. It’s much quicker and more efficient than hauling lots of heavy equipment in and out, and there’s no danger of flat batteries truncating static recording sessions.
- The phone app is easy to use. Static logs are quickly downloadable directly as RINEX. No more laborious desktop post-process using proprietary formats. Download the data, Dale says, manipulate at the office “and you’re done.”
- With their IP67 rating the water and dust proof Emlid receivers are built for rugged weather. The Emlid’s night mode deactivates LED status lights, so “You don’t spend the night wondering if that $80,000 worth of equipment is going to be there in the morning.”
- Dale can set an Emlid unit up where he intends to put his base station the next day, so when he turns up he has the proper coordinates to maintain a contiguous survey. Everything stays in the same datum as he’s moving along, “so I’m not having to use this base station over here, which is three metres different to this one, and having to try to connect it all and do my reinstatement, taking into account that a couple of my stations have to be fixed later on.”
The Verdict
The “highly reliable” Emlid receivers, Dale says, “have saved me a lot of time and effort, and really added value to my business. I couldn’t recommend them enough.”
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT EMLID’S REACH RS2+ RECEIVERS, THAT PERFECTLY SUIT STATIC LOGGING, HEAD TO https://www.mapgear.com.au/static-made-simple/ AND LOOK FOR THE RS2+ PRODUCT ON THE HOME PAGE.
Website: www.mangoesmapping.com.au
Email: sales@mapgear.com.au
