Day 4: North, East and the Rest

A hitherto indisputable truth we learned from our courses in Geomatics Engineering is that, come what may, GPS readings will always be far more accurate than analog readings. Well, we were finally proved wrong today.

The day started with the prof cursing us for not having taken the bearings of any points. We told him that we were not issued any compasses. He made his way to the equipment room, all ready to pounce on the lab workers. He came back in a minute, sullen-faced, and cursed the entire world because there was just one compass available!

The practical today was PT surveying, a simple affair. Sadly, without any coordinates, all we could do was draw the grids while teams went and took bearings. But soon, out of the blue, came GPS readings. Initially, he refused to divulge them, but when he realised that each party was taking an hour to obtain bearings, he gave up and handed over the data.

Ah, GPS! Such a sweet, merciful thing! We plotted the points and chose any traverse of our choice. And then we made our way to Station No. 5 to begin the most enjoyable part of the camp. We plotted such wonderful things, why, it almost felt like poetry. And then it came...

"The Northings and Eastings have been interchanged. You have to restart."

One phone call ruined the entire day. Presumably, some idiot who did not know how to report readings provided us the data, breaking away from the standard reporting convention. Well, that was the end of my PT surveying, because my team effectively ditched me, while I took my own anger out on the poor GPS guy (who, I admit, did apologize for his error). We spent the afternoon chatting with the lab workers, who told us just how pointless this whole camp is and also that we will emerge as thoroughly outdated surveyors through it. How enlightening!

But that wasn't the end of it, for, a phone call informed me that the GPS angles are off from the real ones by as much as 30 degrees - in simple words, the GPS readings are wrong. I'm not sure why - it could be because of an error with magnetic North, or maybe the base station kept losing lock. But I think it's because the people who took the readings were incompetent - after all, who taught them? And it wasn't just the ground coordinates - the elevations were off by a whopping 20m!

So now, as we enter the half-mark (and beyond it in my case), we are left with wrong readings, incomplete PTs and some fantastically voluminous Autolevel data. And then we wonder why nobody gets placed!