First of all thanks to this community as I learned a ton by reading a whole lot of posts here.
Back story: I have been dabbling with GNSS chips for a number of years for no other reason than to blog about them. In most cases it involved Raspberry Pi projects.
I had never heard of the term RTK until somewhat recently and I never had any reason to pursue it and I certainly never had any requirement involving the accuracy it provides.
But that has never stopped me before. When I found out I could learn about this technology for the cost of a GNSS RTK module I went all in. About 6 years ago I moved out in the country and we bought a house from a friend of my wife’s family. It was a private sale and to this day I never had any clue what my property boundaries actually were.
I downloaded my parcel shapefile from a government site in North Carolina. Dropped it in QGIS and without a ton of learning curve pain managed to extract the survey waypoints and drop them in SW Maps and then walked some of them yesterday.
It will be a bit before I can walk the whole property as one entire line is in the woods and in and out of a creek. Additionally, it rained like heck yesterday. Too muddy.
Anyway, as I went along I captured the steps and wrote a blog about it. I know some of you do this for a living so don’t laugh too hard and if you want to pick it apart. I am all ears. The whole point of this going in was to learn. Anyway here are my steps and I hope this in some way helps someone trying to do what I was doing which is just to get a grasp on the technology around this. Link below.
GNSS RTK Property Survey
Nice one John (@JohnEH ) - thank you for sharing!
All best wishes,
Paul
I’ve already commented on your other post on this forum, but I just read your blog post and watched your Youtube videos now.
I see you already got a really detailed post on your blog similar to another comment I made, so I won’t rehash that.
The only thing I’ll add here is that if I was surveying your property, the only monuments I would expect to find (on your lot) would be the northwest corner and maybe the southwest corner at the road. There won’t be any monuments along the road curve, and almost certainly not any monuments along/in the creek. If you can find a plat of your lot, you should be able to see if they placed one along the north line offset from the actual corner in the creek.
Second note, since you’re keeping everything in WGS84, just download the goejson format from NC One. Must easier to deal with and less need to reformat, and SW Maps already works with geojson as well.
If you do find a property corner, let us know. I’d love to know how far off the tax data is compared to what you find using RTK locations.
Thanks. I did figure out that I needed to use WGS84 in both QGIS export and that’s what SW Maps wants to see. I also figured out after dropping the GEOJSON next to the shapefile that it was the more accurate of the two. I spent a rainy day yesterday downloading deeds.
Worked my way backwards on deed history and found the adjacent lot next to me my neighbor bought a few years ago so no one could build there. It specifically lists two existing iron rods along the adjacent lot.
I found one of them and when I went back to search for the one along the same line mentioned in the deed I realized I was getting pretty close to my neighbors house and I didn’t want to spook anyone. It is heavily wooded and sneaking up on houses from the rear is a dangerous sport here in rural NC. I need to go knock on his door tomorrow and just let him know what I’m doing. If I can lock down that spot I think it’s safe to assume that the other points I have on my GEOJSON file will be correct. The one I found already was RTK fix and right on the money.
The other iron rod is deep in tree coverage and probably the best fix I’ll get is RTK Float.
Once I located that rod I’ll basically know that every thing is accurate. I’m not trying to actually survey my property but rather just educate myself on all this GNSS RTK stuff. This is the most practical exercise I can think of doing to prove some proof of concept to myself.
Many thanks for your input. I appreciate it and it is very helpful!