Swallowneck
Member
Opinion Of A Novice Surveyor.
Until this year I had never done any surveying-ever! I had a go with tape/compass etc but had a bit of a nightmare. Obviously it can be done but requires patience and no small amount of skill to get accurate data.
I then got a Distox and Beat Heebs conversion kit and put it all together. Not too difficult if you follow the excellent instructions on the website. Surprisingly it worked perfectly when turned on. Then came the PDA from ebay. ?15 got a Dell PDA,charging cradle and a box of other stuff. Several hours later after struggling with Active Sync,com ports and the Bluetooth I had pocket toppo up and running and talking to the Distox and my PC.
Now I had to do something with this new kit, I went on the paperless surveying course at Bull Pot Farm in Feb and came away with my head swimming with new information a lot of which at the time made very little sense. What we did learn was the basics of using the Distox and PDA and getting data output to a PC. This as it turns out is the easy bit as we were then shown the basics of Therion which for me turned into a bit of a brain meltdown moment. We were also shown what Therion could do in the right hands, this really gave me the motivation to get stuck into and learn this software as the stuff we saw was fantastic.
Having now used the Distox and the PDA combo in a cave and sussed out the best workflow it really is not that difficult, I would hesitate to use the word "easy" but it's not far off. Therion on the other hand is more difficult although this last couple of weeks it is starting to come together and I am quite pleased with the outputs I'm getting. It's a BIG learning curve but hopefully I will stick at it and start to produce some good accurate surveys.
One thing I have noticed is that when you compare our Distox data with older surveys there are some major discrepancy's which of course could be me but as we survey our training passages again and again we will find out.
So Amy if you can I would get a Distox it is loads quicker and has to be less prone to errors, it is also quite good fun. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say about cave surveying.
Until this year I had never done any surveying-ever! I had a go with tape/compass etc but had a bit of a nightmare. Obviously it can be done but requires patience and no small amount of skill to get accurate data.
I then got a Distox and Beat Heebs conversion kit and put it all together. Not too difficult if you follow the excellent instructions on the website. Surprisingly it worked perfectly when turned on. Then came the PDA from ebay. ?15 got a Dell PDA,charging cradle and a box of other stuff. Several hours later after struggling with Active Sync,com ports and the Bluetooth I had pocket toppo up and running and talking to the Distox and my PC.
Now I had to do something with this new kit, I went on the paperless surveying course at Bull Pot Farm in Feb and came away with my head swimming with new information a lot of which at the time made very little sense. What we did learn was the basics of using the Distox and PDA and getting data output to a PC. This as it turns out is the easy bit as we were then shown the basics of Therion which for me turned into a bit of a brain meltdown moment. We were also shown what Therion could do in the right hands, this really gave me the motivation to get stuck into and learn this software as the stuff we saw was fantastic.
Having now used the Distox and the PDA combo in a cave and sussed out the best workflow it really is not that difficult, I would hesitate to use the word "easy" but it's not far off. Therion on the other hand is more difficult although this last couple of weeks it is starting to come together and I am quite pleased with the outputs I'm getting. It's a BIG learning curve but hopefully I will stick at it and start to produce some good accurate surveys.
One thing I have noticed is that when you compare our Distox data with older surveys there are some major discrepancy's which of course could be me but as we survey our training passages again and again we will find out.
So Amy if you can I would get a Distox it is loads quicker and has to be less prone to errors, it is also quite good fun. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say about cave surveying.