Trimble Dimensions

"Dye mensions" as some of our friends from "across the pond" call it, is a great event. I will post a lot more detail when I get back to SD.
For now, I had the pleasure of meeting two posters I hadn't previously seen in peson, Scott Partridge and Tom Bryant. Scott gave a great talk on Low Distortion Projections.

The Bentley Booth looked sad and lonely without Rob Mellis.
More L8er, I'm hanging in "Sin City" a while longer looking for some trouble to get into.
MLB

"looking for some trouble to get into.

Look for some for me, too, while you're there


I hope you are having a great time, I know I would.....

It was an excellent conference. Lots of very good presentations, some applicable only to Trimble users, others that were great for anyone. The gala dinner and show was really good this year (wine and beer included!). Saw some old (not in the age sense) friends and made a few new acquaintances.

Michael Binge, Scott Partridge, Tom Bryant, just to name a few that are common names here.


I have been hesitant to start using Trimble Business Center (TBC), as Trimble Geomatics Office (TGO) has worked great for me for a number of years. It took some time way back when to go to TGO from GPSurvey. The main impediment to moving to TBC was their change from an MS access database in TGO. I have structured all of my office procedures around being able to get baseline info out of TGO by access  queries. Well, they have listened and have created a way to access internal project data. Not totally there yet, just point and feature code info with this release (2.40), but they say the next release will have a lot more. But, what I saw of TBC 2.4 really impressed me. New processor, so there is no longer a ratio indicator or variance. RMS is still there, but not sure how it works, as their example had a bunch of baselines with 0.000 values for the rms. So, little by little I will transition to the new software.

John,

do you know if the presentations will be available online?

I'm interested in your TBC adventure, currently working with TGO and accessing the point table from within my own software ...
I tought TBC was also working with Access tables?
Once our FlePOS system will be ready to track Glonass then we'll need TBC to post process, though most of our work is done by VRS ...

chr.

Chris: they will be available online sometime, but in the past it was only available to conference participants, I believe.

I figured out yesterday how to get what I need out of TBC. You can save the baselines as an excel file. I already have a program written that does the following:
1) scans dat files (and rinex) to get station info and occupation info
2) after processing, reads the TGO .mdb file and gets all of the baseline info.
This information is all stored in an access database with three tables: station, occupation, and baseline. I can then do bluebooking, adjustments, reports etc from there.

I found out that I can access the excel file as if it were a database (using VB 6), and get out all of what I need, plus some more useful info that I wasn't getting before. I process data for other people as well as my own, so being able to have everything in a database makes it much easier to work with GPS data from start to finish. So, I just need some free time to change my program. It is a bit more difficult than reading from an access file, but not terribly.