Survey is the first step before any construction. It requires time and effort to collect a desired data and its difficult to undo the survey. So, here are my of the tips for making a great survey based on my personal experiences.
1. Recce
- This is the most important part of survey. The pace of survey work depends on where you have set your traverse stations or offsets and other control points.
- Make sure to keep stations in such a way that it is uniformly distributed in your study area, from where you can throw the offset and every details can be recorded. Wherever you set travers or offset station some detail will still won’t be visible and you will feel that I could have chosen another place instead of this. This is the part of process.
- Recce should be done with all team members so you can tell at that time where reflector should be kept.
- Go with client in the field tell them to show their property boundary.
2. Sketch
- Don’t hesitate to make figure; first visit field along with helper (carrying reflector) and make sketches also tell those helpers where they need to keep reflector.
- You can also take photos instead of sketches.
- Make D-card for traverse stations; you can also place iron rod and fix it with with concrete for control points so that it can be used later on.
3. Smart Work:
- For example, for buildings you may collect only three point data as in GIS later on we can make four corner building.
- For some unimportant things you can also use non-prism mode this make things very fast.
- You may manually calculate coordinates of traverse stations using calculator. This same work can be done in excel sheet which is fast and has got less chance of errors.
4. Human Resource:
- If you don’t have a good team you are not going to finish given job on time. Team should be such that they should be ready to work even at night by using torch light, in rain or in very sunny day.
- Helper should not hesitate to move and go on difficult terrain, bushes, marshy area to collect data.
- All team members should have the feeling of ownership and think as if its their own project.
- Experience: This matters a lot. Always have some experienced surveyor or helper with you. Project time gets affected with this factor. Having less experienced team member is likely to increase the survey days and the budget.
5. Update:
- Every day check your data in GIS and join point data daily to make features. After few days you will forget so it is advisable to do such task daily.
- Also make sure to overlay features obtained by joining points with google earth imagery. If everything works fine feature should tie up with google earth.
- Visit field daily to check if all features were recorded. Is something missing.
6. Consciousness
- The PCODE that you create in Total Station to record features is very important. Sometime we forget to change that PCODE and record other features and later on plotting in GIS it may create problem. So, we need to take care of such things.
7. Uniformity
- If you are taking building corner point by considering roof not the wall ( which is ideal) then use same concept for all rest of buildings. Don’t mix the things.
Remember at last, if anything goes wrong the credit goes to surveyor. Since the data produced will be later used by architecture, civil engineers for other analysis/planning task we need to collect data from their perspective. Be absolutely clear what kind of data they need and never miss a detail. The difference between an average surveyor and professional is the quality and detail one collects.
Is anything missing ? What are your tips for making a survey project successful ? Please let us know in the comment section.
