The Good "Old" GPS Days!

Remember the "Good Old Days"? BGPS (Before Global Positioning Systems)?  I remember in the early 80's (the 1980's not 1880's) saying that there would be a time when we would "carry a little box out in the woods and set it up on a corner and in a few minutes have it's position in Latitude/Longitude in centimeter accuracy".  Those days are here now in the form of GPS with VRS and WIFI connection.  However, our first foray into the GPS world in 1995 was epic!

We rented the equipment from Seiler in St. Louis for only a couple of days.  It was Trimble 4000 receivers, single frequency with static data that had to be post-processed.  We planned a day of sessions for a job in Mountain View, Missouri, got all our "ducks in a row" and on the night before the BIG DAY...it snowed and sleeted!  Since we already had the equipment and were paying for it, we just went with the plan!!

We finally made it to Mountain View but our points were under the snow, sleet and ice pack.  We used metal locators to find them, shovels and picks to expose them and then made a space big enough for the tripods.   We had to thaw the ice off the receivers after every session and try to get to the next point without getting in the ditch!  It was a thoroughly miserable day but all our sessions processed and within a few months we had our own GPS system!  I found these pictures of that day and thought I would give my thousands of blog followers a chill with them!  Enjoy!

"Yours Truly" set up over a Section Corner in a County Road

Bob Jones (L) and Chris Webster set up on a control point on the east side of Highway 17 just south of Mountain View.