I’ve got a fairly basic survey task, but it’s turning out to be somewhat onerous due to my lack of tool experience, and I’m hoping someone can point to a simple solution since it seems like it should be a fairly common use case. Obvious enough that I initially suspected I was just overlooking something, in fact.
I need to mark out a perimeter based off of the location of a segment of a line defined by two established monuments at the ends. There’s no direct path I can physically take between the two, but both are accessible. Imagine marking out a line between two distant points, then creating a rectangular plot offset 10 feet from that line, with two of the sides of the rectangle parallel and two perpendicular to the reference line.
Since I have two monuments that are accessible, I’ve used the RTK Express kit with correction data via NTRIP from a source a few miles away & SW maps to create two points with averaged readings taken on the monuments and just used the measure tool to draw a line between them, then placed flags along that line zoomed in tightly enough to get within a couple centimeters of it.
The problem came when I needed to create a line perpendicular to that line. I intended to plot a third point of interest away from the line I’d flagged, then draw a line from it to the flagged line to form a right angle, then flag the point where they intercepted. Unfortunately, there’s no way to create that geometry in SW maps that I’ve found, since there’s no way to specify it must be perpendicular.
My next thought was to export the project, load it into a different source, draw the lines, export that back to SW maps, and then return to flag the corner based on that. I expected Google Earth Pro to have this functionality but was dismayed to find that it doesn’t have that functionality either.
Is there any software out there that will allow the sort of snapping and easy basic geometry creation based off of those points that I can then load into SW maps and physically flag out? It seems about the most basic surveying task I can think of, I’m honestly a little surprised that it wasn’t possible in SW maps alone. Am I just missing something here?