Hello everybody. I am a contractor in NJ and I will soon be starting a subdivision of 20 homes. In the past, when I have done single homes, I have had the surveyors come down to mark out the foundation, and I pay about $500. I’m thinking that we can save a lot of money if we do our own solution.
It looks like SparkFun has the most inexpensive devices. But I see that there are tons of kits and devices and I’m a little confused as to which one I should get.
I also see that they have the point perfect accuracy correction, but it looks like that is only 3 to 6 centimeters, which I don’t know if it’s accurate enough, cant have a house 2-3 inches off.
Any guidance on what I should be buying here? Obviously everybody on my team has a cell phone with mobile data.
Welcome Builder! Our devices are superb at outputting X/Y/Z but this is a far cry from what a land surveyor is licensed to do (and legally bound to). From what I’ve been told, surveying relies on a lot of relative distances from known monuments or locations and takes a considerable amount of training to get correct. Said differently, land titles/deeds don’t contain GPS coordinates, they instead refer to distances from other surveyed marks. For good reason: our units are accurate enough they can detect the migration of tectonic plates - today’s measured spot will move a few centimeters a year, every year, relative to the GPS system. So you really don’t want GPS coordinates in legal docs.
But to answer you question: if you’re just starting out, the TX2 is a fine beginner product. It’s got superb accuracy, and when connected with a correction service like our PointPerfect ($15/month), or any other correction service you may have in NJ, it will get you very accurate stakeout lines for driveways or curbs and gutters, but property lines are more tricky.
RTK can be useful, but it wont replace work that’s normally produced with a Total Station.
IE: RTK could set the building/pad corners, but using batter boards & string lines (or similar) for the final wall layout to square, etc. I’d expect you’ll be doing plenty of manual measuring anyway, so RTK can be a great fit.