Survey Notes
- Thread starter Johnny
- Start date
T
twllddu
Guest
usually use a "rite in the rain" A6(?) ish size book. Looking at a double page, notes and station info go on left left page, sketch goes on right.
SamT
Moderator
This thread has been started since I was saying that I found it hard to write all the details down is the way Johnny does.
John Beck (peak district survey guru) has a different style - 1 leg = 1 page of note book - passage details noted. leg drawn on and positions marked. Very easy to put on notes such as 'crawling/flat out/walking.
Easy to mark on cross rifts/joints with thier bearings too.
John was lambasting me for the notes I made the other day. didnt put any passage detail on (this was because I thought that John Beck already had those details from the last survey - It was a surprise when we looked at his notes and discovered that quite a lot of the existing passage had not yet been discovered/surveyed when John Beck was last in there) if that makes sense.
John Beck (peak district survey guru) has a different style - 1 leg = 1 page of note book - passage details noted. leg drawn on and positions marked. Very easy to put on notes such as 'crawling/flat out/walking.
Easy to mark on cross rifts/joints with thier bearings too.
John was lambasting me for the notes I made the other day. didnt put any passage detail on (this was because I thought that John Beck already had those details from the last survey - It was a surprise when we looked at his notes and discovered that quite a lot of the existing passage had not yet been discovered/surveyed when John Beck was last in there) if that makes sense.
Duncan
Member
Here's how we (Hongmeigui CES) organise our notes. So far we've surveyed over 185km in China, so we've got reams and reams of survey notes and have gradually come up with a system for organising them.
The scans of our survey notes are a bit large, so rather than including them as inline images, I've linked to them.
Every survey has a cover sheet.
This identifies which cave the survey is in, who did the survey and what tasks they performed, and which instuments were used. Any calibration data is recorded here. We give each cave a unique number as chinese farmers aren't always very original when naming the caves near their fields, with 'Big Cave' and 'Bottomless Pit' being fairly common names.
The cover sheet also helps protect the first page of 'real' notes from getting mucked up.
Notes
We've got some nice pre-printed waterproof survey paper which is loose-leaf so we can bind it into survey books for each trip and then file the notes away afterwards. If we're in a dry cave we often use ordinary paper. Usually we use interleaved notation for recording survey legs, as it's less writing and uses up less space on the page.
Sketch
Note the cave number and date at the top of the page. We write this on each sheet of paper to prevent them getting muddled up in our filing system. We've got a few thousand sheets of survey notes, so keeping things organised is very important.
We sketch to scale in the cave, which seems like a pain in the backside at first but soon becomes second nature. It saves a lot of time when drawing up the survey on the surface and makes it easier to spot things that have been recorded incorrectly - for example if a leg has been written down backwards it will usually be the right way round in the sketch, and the error can be corrected with a high level of confidence.
Each sketch has a north arrow and a scale bar to ensure that the sketch can be correctly interpreted later.
Elevation
Not much to say about this, but some people seem to routinely survey without drawing an elevation; often it's the most interesting bit as changes in passage height can be quite significant.
Duncan.
The scans of our survey notes are a bit large, so rather than including them as inline images, I've linked to them.
Every survey has a cover sheet.
This identifies which cave the survey is in, who did the survey and what tasks they performed, and which instuments were used. Any calibration data is recorded here. We give each cave a unique number as chinese farmers aren't always very original when naming the caves near their fields, with 'Big Cave' and 'Bottomless Pit' being fairly common names.
The cover sheet also helps protect the first page of 'real' notes from getting mucked up.
Notes
We've got some nice pre-printed waterproof survey paper which is loose-leaf so we can bind it into survey books for each trip and then file the notes away afterwards. If we're in a dry cave we often use ordinary paper. Usually we use interleaved notation for recording survey legs, as it's less writing and uses up less space on the page.
Sketch
Note the cave number and date at the top of the page. We write this on each sheet of paper to prevent them getting muddled up in our filing system. We've got a few thousand sheets of survey notes, so keeping things organised is very important.
We sketch to scale in the cave, which seems like a pain in the backside at first but soon becomes second nature. It saves a lot of time when drawing up the survey on the surface and makes it easier to spot things that have been recorded incorrectly - for example if a leg has been written down backwards it will usually be the right way round in the sketch, and the error can be corrected with a high level of confidence.
Each sketch has a north arrow and a scale bar to ensure that the sketch can be correctly interpreted later.
Elevation
Not much to say about this, but some people seem to routinely survey without drawing an elevation; often it's the most interesting bit as changes in passage height can be quite significant.
Duncan.
Johnny
New member
[align=center]:shock: 185k :shock: We get that every weekend in Derbyshire :wink:[/align]
Very organised, but surveying should be, there is nothing worse than getting to the drawing up stage and realising that a bit of info is missing or you have insuficient confidence in your notes and you might as well not have bothered.
I agree correlation between bearing and elevation and, sometimes subtle, relation of the two can tell you allot.
Your data table seems to be compatible with On Station, what software do you use?
Very organised, but surveying should be, there is nothing worse than getting to the drawing up stage and realising that a bit of info is missing or you have insuficient confidence in your notes and you might as well not have bothered.
Duncan said:
I agree correlation between bearing and elevation and, sometimes subtle, relation of the two can tell you allot.
Your data table seems to be compatible with On Station, what software do you use?
D
Dave H
Guest
Don't forget to check your notes as soon as you get home, as it's much easier to clear up mistakes/queeries when everything is clear in your memory. And it's a chance to seperate the wet pages before they become a board!
The Cave Surveying Group were experimenting with a device to aid the drawing of scale images underground, I can't remember the name of it (except it started th... and came from Europe) but I remember that Wookey and Ollie were quite impressed.
The Cave Surveying Group were experimenting with a device to aid the drawing of scale images underground, I can't remember the name of it (except it started th... and came from Europe) but I remember that Wookey and Ollie were quite impressed.
T
twllddu
Guest
If the cave and time permits I usually use a six inch ruler and a small protractor to assist getting the sketch to look vaguely as it should. The protractor does help with making sure angles are the right way round on plans and elevations.
Duncan
Member
Johnny said:
We use Survex, which allows you to format your data in pretty much any way you want. This reduces another opportunity for errors to creep into the survey data as it's being entered into the computer - if you have to reverse legs or change the order of the data to make it acceptable to a particular piece of software it's very easy to cock it up, and it's also harder to check the data against the original notes if it's arranged differently.
