Students and staff awoke to clear skies and the promise of a good days work ahead. Setup on site began early with the GPS base station being positioned and theodolite stations setup, ready for a day of garden and trench survey. It wasn’t long before work became rocky, both in a literal and metaphoric sense – with the total station set for recording stone alignments refusing to close the polygon shapes, creating an intricate beeline patterning across the digital landscape. Several minutes of intense button pushing ensued to no avail, this was now a job for post-processing. Further technical issues emerged throughout the day, but work progressed well despite this, ending with the newly deturfed levels being shot in, a perimeter survey of the garden completed and a large amount of the garden rocks mapped. Despite several periods of extended down time during technical difficulties, both Jono and Francesca, the two field-school students assigned to survey for today, were keen and learned the operation of the machines quickly under difficult circumstances.
Once back at the house post-processing began in earnest, tidying the somewhat problematic data collected during the day. With the help of Jono the processing was completed in 4 hours and a plan view map of the garden was generated for further detailed mapping in the days to come.
Lets hope this… “rocky work” … goes smoother tomorrow!
xoxo GIS GIRLS (Sam & Tara)