Welcome (yes, it's me)

Welcome to the Blog of the Santa Clara County Surveyor being brought to you by Gwen Gee, PLS, CFedS.







We hope this will provide you updates and handy information about our office.















Tuesday, July 12, 2011

One more thing about GPS

One thing I want to mention is the looming threat to lose our GPS that we rely on so dearly. Please check out the link below. Short story is that a company LightSquared is on the verge of putting all our our survey grade GPS outta whack....how? INTERFERENCE. Simply put. We rely on having a good signal for good results (yes, along with a few other good things) Now imagine our GPS couldn't pick up a signal for initialization or  get connected to a base station. That would be a bummer. We expect that every now and then which then usually follows up with a call to tech. support. But imagine if all that expensive equipment just won't pick up a signal anymore....that would be a big time bummer. Don't think we want to go back to the way we "used to do" it in this day and economy.


I invite you to check out the following website. Read it for yourself, make your own decision.

Save Our GPS at  http://www.saveourgps.org/

We didn't get on the GIS train when it came, I hate to see us get passed up again.

ACSM - Survey Summit - ESRI UC Conference

Hi all,

San Diego was definitely where is was all at.
Well at least for surveying and mapping with some good weather too.

While our shrinking survey profession continues to survive, the GIS community grew a bit.  The ESRI User Conference had 15,000 attendees this year.  This is the first I've attended both.  The Survey Summit registration gets you into the first two days of the ESRI User Conference.  There couldn't have been more of a sharper contrast that these two conferences, yet our work interlaces in many ways.  Perhaps we could someday ride the GIS wave like a surfer does on a surf board.  I'll leave that for another discussion or post.

For the conference information:


Survey Summit   http://www.surveysummit.com/index.html

ESRI User Conference  http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/index.html

Maybe see you at the next gathering....
Gwen