Manuals for the use of GPS and Leica Total Station

By following a link from the gvSIG mailing lists, which today has formalized the final version 1.10, I found an interesting site. This is Openarcheology.net, driven by Oxford Archeology which seeks to promote the use of tools and free systems for surveying applications in archaeological projects.

The most valuable of the site are the manuals for the use of surveying equipment, including downloading data and layers integration in gvSIG.

Manuals look very practical, because they are not themselves mere documents for the use of tools but are oriented in the methodology to make a survey and for integration into a Geographic Information System. It includes solving problems and formats for data collection.

On the site there is at least 7 documents, apparently they have several contributors but the methodological adaptation is from Anna Kathrin Hodgkinson. Here is the list of manuals; three of these contain a second edition that used gvSIG 1.9 and some enhancements to the documents.

• Using the Leica Total Station (Robotics) 1200 Series.
• Using the Leica Total Station 1200 Series.
• Using Leica GX1230 (backpack)
• Using Leica GPS RX1250XC

It is a valuable material for some this will have the disadvantage that are in English, but will be useful since the order step by step is well constructed.

To download data it is used Leica GeoOffice. For the GIS integration it is used gvSIG and it is explained some basic issues such as image georeferencing, editing layers, joining tables in layout and printing, etc.

For sample I leave the index of the first manual (Robotic Total Station 1200Series):

Introduction
Protocols for Setting up the Leica 1200 Total Station
– A few notes
– Survey Book
– End of survey
– Weather conditions
– Survey Setup
– Setting up the Total Station
– Creating a new Job
– The Setup procedure (after job creation)
– Setting up the Back sight-Prism
– Surveying
– Start of survey
– General Survey
– A rough guide to coding and point IDs
Creating points files with co-ordinates and uploading them into the Total Station
Setting out
Troubleshooting on site
– Survey Errors
– Problems encountered with the Total Station
– The EDM and ATR default settings in the Total Station
Protocols for downloading the Leica 1200
Protocols for inputting data into GIS
– The Project Manager
– The data you will deal with
– Point and line data
– Merging and updating the data
Editing Shapefiles
Adding Tables / Events Layers to gvSIG
Joining tables
Printing in gvSIG
Georeferencing
Problems encountered with gvSIG

Appendix 1:
Control Co-Ordinates:
Appendix 2:
Survey Codelist
Appendix 3:
Metadata
Appendix 4:
Drawing of Plans

From here you can download the manuals.