RTK Hell & Success
MFT: Swimming mid-day for a quick cool-off
LFP: Mosquitos & Ef**ing ARC GIS
Hallo, so yesterday was mostly wrestling with the RTK GPS. The morning it went well, we walked a bit around the island and it was working. I mean sure it would crash arc-pad unexpectedly every now and then and we would lose all the data that we had just logged, but otherwise it was working! I mean we were logging like 1-2 cm VERTICAL accuracy. How cool is that? In the vertical, we can measure the height of the land within 1-2 cm. We can measure the horizontal plane with 0.5-1 cm accuracy. It's pretty amazing.
One of the best parts of yesterday was running errands to the main island (Majuro). Steph and I went by boat and spent 2 hours buying supplies and groceries. Our boatman took us along the other islands nice and slow so we could test the range on the RTK (about 7 km before the error gets too bad). This meant we also had time to admire the gorgeous water and islands.
The afternoon is when the RTK and ESRI ARC hell hit us. So for those of you lucky people who do not know what this means, let me explain. ESRI is a software company that has made a suite of software products for geographic analysis. Let's say you want to see spatial analysis of how people are affected by the building of cities and in particular trash dump sites. If you had information like people health, trash site locations, as a data set over time, then it might be hard to look at patterns changing over time using traditional software (not GIS). However, GIS can be a very powerful way to look at these patterns visually. Anyways, I have always hated ARC (the most common GIS software). I think it is completely bloated, over uses your computer processor, RAM, video card, harddrive, ect, and has TERRIBLE user interface. Periodically I have felt bad about saying this about ARC. As of yesterday I am fully vindicated in my analysis.
Our RTK GPS is supposed to track data using ARC-pad (a supposedly mobile/light version of ARC) on a small handheld device (think somewhere between a cell phone and an ipad). The problem is that it is overly complicated, completely UNINTUITIVE, and it crashes constantly. So all afternoon Steph and I were supposed to collect topo data from around the island. So we start walking. We walk about 15 minutes and are just about to end the line we are collecting and then ARC freezes. So we lose all that data of the past 15 minutes. This repeated all afternoon. We could not walk more than 2 minutes before losing ARC (sometimes even less time). It was incredibly frustrating to put it mildly.
Anywho, the day ended much better than the afternoon because we had a cookout! Steph and I had bought chicken and marinades and Chris barbequed them on the grill! It was a hoot and very yummy. Here are some photos of the day.
LFP: Mosquitos & Ef**ing ARC GIS
Hallo, so yesterday was mostly wrestling with the RTK GPS. The morning it went well, we walked a bit around the island and it was working. I mean sure it would crash arc-pad unexpectedly every now and then and we would lose all the data that we had just logged, but otherwise it was working! I mean we were logging like 1-2 cm VERTICAL accuracy. How cool is that? In the vertical, we can measure the height of the land within 1-2 cm. We can measure the horizontal plane with 0.5-1 cm accuracy. It's pretty amazing.
One of the best parts of yesterday was running errands to the main island (Majuro). Steph and I went by boat and spent 2 hours buying supplies and groceries. Our boatman took us along the other islands nice and slow so we could test the range on the RTK (about 7 km before the error gets too bad). This meant we also had time to admire the gorgeous water and islands.
The afternoon is when the RTK and ESRI ARC hell hit us. So for those of you lucky people who do not know what this means, let me explain. ESRI is a software company that has made a suite of software products for geographic analysis. Let's say you want to see spatial analysis of how people are affected by the building of cities and in particular trash dump sites. If you had information like people health, trash site locations, as a data set over time, then it might be hard to look at patterns changing over time using traditional software (not GIS). However, GIS can be a very powerful way to look at these patterns visually. Anyways, I have always hated ARC (the most common GIS software). I think it is completely bloated, over uses your computer processor, RAM, video card, harddrive, ect, and has TERRIBLE user interface. Periodically I have felt bad about saying this about ARC. As of yesterday I am fully vindicated in my analysis.
Our RTK GPS is supposed to track data using ARC-pad (a supposedly mobile/light version of ARC) on a small handheld device (think somewhere between a cell phone and an ipad). The problem is that it is overly complicated, completely UNINTUITIVE, and it crashes constantly. So all afternoon Steph and I were supposed to collect topo data from around the island. So we start walking. We walk about 15 minutes and are just about to end the line we are collecting and then ARC freezes. So we lose all that data of the past 15 minutes. This repeated all afternoon. We could not walk more than 2 minutes before losing ARC (sometimes even less time). It was incredibly frustrating to put it mildly.
Anywho, the day ended much better than the afternoon because we had a cookout! Steph and I had bought chicken and marinades and Chris barbequed them on the grill! It was a hoot and very yummy. Here are some photos of the day.
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| Here is our local pig and our pavillion/kitchen! |
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| Putting the HOBO location on the RTK |
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| Steph in action |
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| RTKing (while it was working) |
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| Traditional sailboat of the area |
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| GORGEOUS Motu |
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| Sooo pretty :) |
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| RTK troubleshooting |
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| More troubleshooting with the RTK |
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