Focusing on High-quality Surveying Instruments

FOIF

FOIF (Suzhou FOIF Co., Ltd.) is located in Suzhou Industrial Park in China, near Shanghai. The company has integrated the disciplines of R&D, manufacturing, sales, logistics and after-sales service to address the measurement needs of the construction and surveying industries by providing high-quality instruments including gyroscopes, GNSS receivers, total stations, theodolites, levels, laser plummets, etc. The company has evolved into the leading manufacturer of its kind in China. The origins of FOIF date back nearly 50 years, with the founding of Suzhou First Optical Instrument Factory in 1958. Over the past almost half a century, FOIF has achieved many ‘firsts’... (read more)

2014-04-30 12:07:02

Gexcel Presents Wearable Mobile Surveying System

Gexcel, an Italian provider of Lidar and imagery analysis software solutions, has entered the 3D mobile mapping market with its HERON system. HERON is Gexcel’s innovative professional indoor and outdoor real-time 3D surveying system, developed under an EC-JRC licence. Developed for challenging mapping and surveying tasks, such as deep dark underground mines or tunnels or in a complex industrial area, HERON is suited both for surveying, localisation and model-comparison tasks. Surveying For challenging surveying jobs the system works as follows. The surveyor wears the HERON backpack laser scanner and walks along the site without using GPS/GNSS, targets and trolleys. The... (read more)

2017-05-23 04:33:57

Surveying the Past Using a Drone

Modelling the Caesar’s Camp Oppidum under Dense Cover

Archaeology has long been reliant on ground-level geophysical disciplines and aerial photographs shot from an aircraft or ultralight. Airborne observations not only enable remains that are invisible on the ground to be detected and studied in a non-destructive way, but also to pinpoint where reconnaissance probes or excavations should be performed. If a site is covered by dense vegetation, Lidar is the only tool practicable for aerial observation. Lidar was applied in a unmanned aerial system (UAS or ‘drone’) survey of the site known as ‘Caesar’s Camp’, situated in the French municipality of Changé/Saint-Piat, located 2km south of Maintenon. The... (read more)

2018-02-01 09:17:39

The Parallels between Surveying and Journalism

Wim van Wegen, content manager of 'GIM International', recently attended the Year in Infrastructure Conference in the UK, organised annually by Bentley Systems. Comments by the company's chief communication officer, Chris Barron, set him thinking about the parallels between surveying and journalism. In this column, he probes the similarities further against the backdrop of today's data-driven society and the digital transformation. In October I was in London to attend the Year in Infrastructure Conference, organised annually by Bentley Systems. Chris Barron, chief communication officer at the software solution provider for engineers and construction professionals, kicked off the Media Day with warm... (read more)

2018-11-22 10:16:01

Report: First European Aerial Surveying Summit

Generating Sustainable Business for an Innovative Industry

Today’s digital societies require a continuous supply of updated, reliable and correct geodata, and new technologies are arriving with increasing speed. The manned aerial survey is by far the main source of high-resolution geographical data in the geoinformation ecosystem. This article looks back on the first edition of the European Aerial Surveying Summit, which was held in Denmark in December 2018. When people talk about geographical data and its creation, then satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or ‘drones’) – ubiquitous in the daily media stream – often spring to mind. Lately, mobile surveying systems have started to take on... (read more)

2019-01-16 10:13:32

Land Surveying: Towards a Smarter Life

FIG Working Week in Hanoi, Vietnam, 22-26 April 2019

Surveyors and land professionals from all over the world came together in April in the heat of Hanoi to take part in the FIG 2019 Working Week. This year’s theme was ‘Geospatial information for a smarter life and environmental resilience’. The conference had a strong focus on tackling climate change by working towards a smarter life, both through the development of smart cities and also in rural areas. Spatial information, big data, surveying, BIM, land administration and much more are recognized as being essential factors in this development. There is a strong awareness that Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly... (read more)

2019-06-27 09:25:08

Surveying in the Valley of the Temples

Use of Full-waveform TLS in 3D Modelling of an Unstable Area

Full-waveform terrestrial laser scanning enables high-precision 3D topographic modelling of unstable rock valleys that is valuable for various geomorphological investigations. The area below the archaeological site of Temple of Juno in Agrigento, Sicily, is characterised by the presence of large sections of rock that have fallen down from the upper ridge. In this context, full-waveform laser scanning technology was tested for the production of a highly detailed 3D topographic model at two resolutions (2cm and 20cm) for simulating potential rockfall paths at the site. Along a long ridge outside the city of Agrigento, Sicily, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,... (read more)

2014-11-03 10:47:25

20 GNSS Instruments for Seismic Surveying Company

Altus Positioning Systems has delivered 20 APS-3U GNSS surveying instruments to TerraView Surveys, a Canadian seismic surveying company based in Calgary, Alberta. Altus’s Canadian dealer, Butler Survey Supplies, was responsible for the sale and provided extensive technical support and training. The Altus APS-3U receivers are being used with Nautiz NX7 data collectors and MicroSurvey Seismic Surveyor software for seismic surveying and GIS mapping applications. TerraView also uses GPSeismic and GrafNav software for post-processing. Ron Stewart, president of TerraView Surveys, commented that the Altus APS-3U receivers have significantly improved their productivity, especially when working beneath heavy tree cover. Occupation times have... (read more)

2013-02-22 10:24:43

South Located in Newly Named Surveying Building

South Surveying recently completed its new headquarters in Guangzhou, China, where more than 1,000 of its employees are now working in national and global sales, research & development, quality assurance, marketing and manufacturing of total stations, GIS software and GNSS receivers. To express the importance it places on the field of geomatics in general and surveying in particular, South has proudly renamed its new premises 'the Surveying Building'. The building is situated adjacent to the downtown boulevard in this busy metropolis in the southern region of China, a country that is working on its infrastructure and construction at a previously... (read more)

2012-04-18 11:40:18

Total Stations for Bavarian Surveying Agency

The Bavarian Agency for Surveying and Geographic Information (Landesamt für Vermessung und Geoinformation Bayern (LVG), Germany) will equip all of its Cadastral Offices with total-station technology from Leica Geosystems. Up to 500 Leica Viva TS15 total stations will be provided over a period of five years. The first batch of 154 TS15 total stations was delivered through this framework contract in December 2011. The LVG has 51 state survey offices with 22 satellite offices in Bavaria, which between them manage and continuously update the official land survey register containing over 10 million plots of land. 500 survey teams... (read more)

2012-01-11 04:54:19