Defining
a Setup Station
Now you need to change the “Type” of entry to be a Station, and enter in
the coordinates of the point occupied or set up over in the field.
Use your mouse to select the “down arrow” on the right of the “type”
column, and you will be given a selection of the entry types available.
Select STN to indicate a station.
Enter 1 for Stn (point) number, and
then the East coordinate of 500, the North coordinate of 1000 and a height of
100. Now press the Enter key until you
finish off the line and the cursor moves down to the next line.
Here you will need to define a Setup or AT/BS type of data to indicate
where you set your theodolite AT, and the point, or bearing you used as a
Backsight (BS).
Again position the cursor in the “type” column, and use the pull down
arrow to show the data types available. Select the AT/BS and press the Enter
key.
Enter an At Stn of 1, and a bearing of
0.00.
In the BS column, you should enter 0 to indicate that you are satisfied
that the bearing you set is correct (even if assumed) and you don’t wish the
program to check for you.
You should then enter the height of instrument.
Note: If you have sighted to a known point for your backsight, you
should enter the coordinates of that point as an STN type of data before this
point.
Then you should enter the point number of the Stn in the BS column.
The program will then calculate the correct bearing from the point you
have occupied to the point you sighted to, and compare it with the bearing you
have entered as a backsight bearing.
If there is a difference between the calculated bearing and the observed
bearing, the program will automatically add the difference to all shots taken
from the station to ensure that they are on the correct coordinate system.
It will use the corrected bearing in calculating the coordinates, but
will leave your field readings as you took them, so you won’t see any changes
unless you do an expanded printout.
Now that you have specified the Station coordinates to be used, and the
details of your Setup, it is time to commence entering the detail shots. From
the field notes supplied you can see that these have all come from an
electronic instrument which can reduce the raw readings and record a horizontal
distance and a reduced level.
Setting
Default Data Type
Since this Horizontal Distance and Reduced Level is the type of data we
wish to enter from now on, you should set this data type to be the default.
From the Options Menu, select the Entry Type option and click on the
button beside HD/RL to set this as the default type of data.
Next enter a point number of 100, a bearing of 40.23, a distance of 99.8
and an RL of 102.52.
In this data we have generally not recorded codes or descriptions with
the points, so press the Enter, or Tab keys to move past these columns and onto
the next line.
You will see that the point number will increment for you automatically,
and you should continue entering the data from the field notes until you have
completed point 115.
When you have completed entering Point 115, you will need to change your
data type to an AT/BS to indicate that you have moved the instrument.
Position the cursor in the left hand column and use the pull down arrow
to select a type of AT/BS
The AT Stn is point 112, the bearing (or azimuth) is 234.23 to a BS Stn
of Point 1. Height of instrument is 1.65.
Press Enter or Tab to finish off the line, and you will notice that when
the cursor reaches the next line the default entry type of HD/RL will again
appear.
The screen adjacent shows progress to this point.
Note that the numbering is a little astray at this point as the program
wants to continue numbering from point 113, but you had already gone past that
point, so enter a correct point number of 116 and continue entering the data
until it is finished.
Now before we proceed any further, we need to know if we have entered
the data correctly, and one quick guide to this is to inspect the coordinates
calculated for the stadia shots to see if they “make sense”.
Note you are not trying to check if they are exactly correct, merely
checking if they are in the right “Ball Park”.
So if you set up on a point with coordinates with a value of around 500,
and you took a shot with a distance of no more than 100 metres, it is
reasonable to expect that the resulting coordinate will be somewhere between
400 and 600.
If you are wondering why this is reasonable, perhaps this is an
appropriate time to consider if another career might be better suited for you,
because with this and any other technical software, you MUST have a basic
understanding of what answer you need . Never trust the computer - check
always.
So, to check what you have achieved, pull down the Options menu item and
select Calculate Coordinates. Next pull down the Options
menu again, and now select Show Coordinates.
Now use the scroll
bar at the bottom of the stadia screen to move the display to expose the right
hand side as seen below
While the East values appear to be in the “ball park”, the North values
look a little “odd”, but that is because the column is not wide enough to
accommodate the number.
Place your cursor on the column marker between North and Height, and
drag the marker to the right to make a bigger column.
You should now see that the values are all between 900 and 1100 which
seems appropriate in this case.
NOTE: You should also scroll down until you reach the end of the data,
and you should pay particular attention to see that the coordinates remain
“reasonable” after you have entered a change of occupied station, because
experience has shown that this is where a mistake is most likely to occur.
If a problem has occurred you should go back and check on the values you
have entered compared to those on the field sheets supplied, and make the
relevant corrections.
Once everything is in order, it is time to store the data away into the
database.
You need to be aware that the raw data is stored in its own file, and
that only the calculated coordinates are actually transferred to the database.
It is therefore important that in your own jobs, if you come back and make
modifications to some of the raw data, you need to again store the coordinates
into the database before you will see any of the changes.
To achieve this pull down the Options menu from the Stadia menu bar and
select the option Store Data in database.
A window will pop up to allow you to control what part of the data is
stored. In some instances you may have shots to control stations which are
remote from the job itself, or some other points which you don’t wish to store
with the job, and in those cases you can store only the range of points you
require.
In this case, we wish to store all the points in the Survey into the
database, and since this is the default of the screen you need only select 
the OK button.
Printing a Hard Copy
Now that the raw data is stored in a stadia file, and the reduced
coordinates are safely stored in the database, the next thing you need to do is
to print out the contents of the raw
stadia to store away in the job file.
First you should pull down the File menu in the Stadia sheet window as
seen in the screen adjacent
Then you should check Print Setup to ensure that the correct printer is
assigned, and that the paper size and orientation is as you require.
Once you are satisfied with the settings, use the Print Preview option to have a look at the prospective
output, and when you are satisfied you can simply print the data.
Since the exact format of the output will depend on the printer you are
using we will leave it to you to tweak the settings where necessary to get the best
formatted output for your particular configuration of equipment.
Once you have successfully printed out the stadia, close the stadia
window, using either the File Close menu command, or the Close “X” in the top right hand corner of the window.
The program will
ask if you wish to save the changes you have made to the Survey information,
and you should select Yes.
When the job appears, the active window will be smaller than the full
area available, so use the Maximise button on the top right corner of the job
window to make it fill the screen, as seen.
If your screen resembles the one shown, you are now ready to proceed to
form and contour the model. If your
screen does not appear as shown, please go back to the start of the tutorial
and work your way through again to rectify the problem.
Forming the Model & Contours
Now pull down the Contour menu and select the Surface Parameters option,
Select the Reset button and the adjacent screen will appear.
The parameters on this screen will default to settings which will
normally achieve a reasonable contour model of natural surface data, but in this case we do not have a large
height variation in the data, so it may be advantageous to change the contour
intervals to values which will give us more contours to view.
So in this case, change the major contour interval to 2.00 and the minor
contour interval to 0.20 and then select the OK button.
Next pull down the Contour menu again, and this time select the Surface
Area option.
The screen should appear as below left, and select the Extents button to
indicate you wish to model the full extents of the job.
Next pull down the Contour Menu again, and this time select the Form
Model option, and the screen should appear as in the screen below right,
displaying the triangle mesh.
Providing all has progressed satisfactorily to this point, can now pull
down the Contour menu one more time, and this time the option you need to
select is Calculate Contours.
The contours will appear on the screen as they are calculated, and you
will be asked if you wish to store them.
Unless some unexpected disaster has intervened, your contours should
appear vaguely regular, and you should indicate that you do want them to be
stored.
The program will report that it is sorting various contour values before
leaving you with a screen seen below.
Setting
up the Printer/Plotter
Now that you have managed to display the contours, it is time to get
ready to plot them out, but before you can proceed you need to make sure that
the plotter you intend to use is configured as the current Windows printing
device.
Normally most windows systems have a small laser or inkjet printer
configured as the default print device, and this is fine for most of the time,
but now we wish to plot on a A1 sheet, not a small A4 sheet.
Pull down the File menu, and choose Print Setup.
Now you need to pull down the list of installed printers and select your
plotter.
Since we have no
idea what equipment you are likely to have installed, we cannot give specific
guidance, but the computer this tutorial was written on has a Canon LBP4i set
as its default printer, and a plotter driver for the HP350C is also installed,
so we will use those devices for illustration purposes.
You will need to substitute whatever equipment you have connected to
your particular computer.
In the screen at left we are in the process of choosing the HP350C to be
selected as the current printer in place of the existing Cannon laser printer.
Note that using this process does NOT replace the default printer.
It simply sets the printer selected to be the current printer until the
program is finished, and this is normally what we want.
If you wish to change the default printer each time, or indulge in some
other form of techno wizardry feel free, so long as you get a device with an A1
sheet of paper as your current printing device at this point in time.
Once you have selected the relevant plotter, you then need to select the
Properties tab to allow you to set the plotter up.
In the screen at left we have used the plotter driver to select an A1
sheet of paper with a Landscape orientation, and we suggest that you do the
same.
Please note that there are a variety of other settings concerned with
roll feeds or communications ports or paper types that you also need to have
correctly set if you are to achieve a sensible plot.
However it is beyond the scope of this tutorial to deal with all of these
items and you will need to rely on your own training or local expert to guide
you in these areas.
Once you have set the plotter to use some A1 paper in landscape mode you
should close the Print Setup option.
Since we are going to be trying to position a sheet of paper around the 
job, it is a good
idea to Zoom Out so you can see more of
the job, and how it will fit on a sheet, so select the icon
The screen should now appear as shown at left
Plot
Parameters
Pull down the File Menu, and select Plot Parameters, and the plot
parameters screen will appear as below.
The Name Field
will allow you to type in the Number, or name of the plot file you wish to
save, but on this case we are looking to get a plot straight out onto the plotter,
so there is no need to use it. If you wish to export a DWG,DXF, or FPF you will
need to provide a name.
Set the scale to 1:200, and don’t worry about the origin, as we will fix
that by positioning the plot window.
In jobs where you know the origin you require the plot sheet to be set
at, you can type those values directly into the fields here.
Point Parameters
Next select the Tab marked Point Param, and the screen will appear as
below
If you wish to plot points you need to check the box marked Points so
that 
a tick appears.
You can then decide on what marker you require on the points by using
the Pull down selection box with a cross in it.
In this instance, a cross will be fine, and the default size of 2.5 will
be adequate.
You can plot out one or a number of the attributes by ticking the
relevant boxes in the left hand column. Here we only want point numbers, so
make sure its box is ticked, and the remainder are clear.
If you wish to change the Font, colour or size of the text you are plotting,
you can select the Change button, and choose from the many options presented.
Next you will see two columns that will allow you to individually
position the text about the point marker.
If you are only plotting 1 piece of text then the default will be fine,
but if you wish to plot two pieces of information e.g. point number and height,
you need to fill in the ” Yoff” column to indicate where you want the second
piece positioned.
For example, if you wish to plot Point number and height, and you require
the height below the point number, leave point at a Y offset of 0 and set
height to a Y offset of -4.
You can reverse the positions by reversing the Y offsets of the points,
and you can customise the plot to appear exactly as you wish.
You can also fool around (sorry that should be experiment) with the X
positions if you wish, and we leave it to you to examine the flexibility this
feature provides you.
The column titled Angle allows you to rotate the text about the marker.
Zero is horizontal to the right, and you can use a negative value to indicate
that you want the text to slope down, and a positive value to slope it up.
If the text you are plotting contains decimal places, you can use the
Acc (uracy) column to specify how many decimal places should be used.
Once you have set up the parameters to your liking you should proceed.
You should choose the Point Selection, and use the Reset button to
ensure that all points in the job are included in the plot.
There are no strings in this job, so you can skip the two tabs with
“String” in them and move on to the Tab marked Contours.
Contour
Parameters
When you select
the Contour tab, the adjacent screen will appear.
Select the Contour check box to indicate that you want contours.
Select Smooth, and accept the default factor of 0.4. (The adventurous
among you can try experimenting with this number later to see that values
closer to 1.0 will give you a ‘smoother’ contour, but can also cause the
contours to ‘loop back’ on themselves if the value is too high for the
particular data.
You can choose the colour you require for both major and minor contours
by selecting the Pen button and choosing a colour from the palette presented.
If you wish, and we don’t suggest you should at this stage of your education,
you can use different linetypes by selecting the button and choosing from the
table of available linetypes displayed.
At this stage we have not indicated that we want any labels on the
contours, so we will proceed and position the plot without them.
OK returns to the graphic
screen, which will now appear as at right, and the dashed rectangle around the
job represents the plot sheet you have chosen (A1 in this case) at the scale
you have assigned (1:200).
Positioning
the Plot
Pull down the File menu and select Position Plot Window.
You will now see a solid rectangle appear attached to your cursor, and
you should move this rectangle until it frames the job in the manner you
require.
When you have it located to your satisfaction, simply press the left
mouse button and the border of the plot sheet will be re-located to suit.
In this case I suggest that you “centre” the job in the sheet by fixing
in a position similar to that in the screen at left.
Print
Preview.
Now you should
pull down the File menu and select the Print Preview option.
The screen should appear as seen below, and you zoom in for a closer
look at particular areas if you choose.
You might like to zoom in around one of the points being plotted to see
if the size and location of the text is appropriate.
If you wished, you could now press the Print key and windows would take
over and plot out your creation for you.
At this point however, you do not have any labels on your contours, so I
suggest you do the next step before wasting a sheet of paper.
Positioning
Contour Labels
If you wish to have labels plotted on your major contours you need to
locate them, and I will show you how.
Pull down the Contours menu, and highlight the Option titled Position
Labels.
You will see two options, but we will use the Manual method, so please
choose it.
The Automatic method simply puts labels a set distance apart along each
major contour, and you can experiment with this for yourself.
To manually position the labels, all you need to do is to draw lines
across the contours to indicate where you would like a label to be positioned.
All you need to do is pick a point, move the cursor across the contours
so the line you are drawing intersects the contour lines and the pick the end
point.
You may enter as many lines as you think you might need.
When you have finished drawing the lines, simply press the Enter key.
At each point where one of your lines intersects a major contour, the
contour will be broken and its height will be inserted.
The screen
below left shows some of the lines in the process of being drawn, and the one
below right shows the result once the labels have appeared, although you will
se it better on your actual screen
Now that you have labels, pull down the File menu; select Plot
Parameters, followed by the Contour Tab.
Now select the check box adjacent to Major label, and set the colour of
your choice.
If you now return to the File menu and do a Print Preview, you should
see labels on the contours, and now you can commit your creation to paper with
the Print key if you wish.
The screen below shows a zoomed in view of the Print Preview screen
where I have been a little creative with positioning of the point attributes,
and it also has contour labels clearly visible, although a little small.
If you go back to the Contour parameters screen and increase the Font
Size for the contour labels you should be ready to commit your handiwork to
paper by using the Print button instead of the Print Preview option.
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