What You Are Saying

Readers share thoughts on surveying trends, more

POB wants to hear from you! Let us know what you think about any POB content in print or online by sending an email to Editor Perry A. Trunick at trunickp@bnpmedia.com. You can also send a Tweet to @POBMag, leave a message on the Point of Beginning Facebook page, connect with us on LinkedIn, or visit the RPLS Network at www.rpls.com.

Email to the Editor
Re: September Solo Notes

G’day Neil,

I’ve just been reading the article in POB written by Ms. King, based on the interview you had in Solo Notes.

I’m very interested in your efforts to become a licensed surveyor and your dedication to the profession. What tripped my interest is that here in the 21st century, year 2016, you are going through where I was at in March 1965, when I became a licensed surveyor and authorized mine surveyor in Western Australia, after my years of study and working “hands on” in the field as a survey assistant/technician.

I’m still very involved these days mentoring younger surveyors and engineers from our base at Albany, on the south coast of Western Australia, after a lifetime working in all fields of surveying onshore, offshore and underground. It’s been a huge change in the technologies from my early days using steel measuring bands and 20-second open Vernier theodolites, sextants and lead lines, and piano wires hanging down mine shafts with very heavy plum bobs attached in drums of sum oil to dampen the oscillating piano wires!

Putting places on the map all over Australia and then in Africa and the Middle Eastern countries was often very challenging, with teams of local indigenous people taken on to help do some of the “grunt” work. Altus GPS equipment we purchased from California in recent years, together with the modern Leica robotics we purchased from Switzerland, have made our tasks very efficient, but you still have to lump those 25- and 30-kilogram packs around the rougher sites, so I can sympathize with your one-man operation, as you build up a business in Kentucky and Tennessee.

I believe that I have quite a few distant family connections in both Kentucky and Tennessee that trace back to our Scottish roots in the highlands of the north of Scotland where I spent my earliest years, before my family migrated out to Australia. I think one of these relatives ended up as the governor of Tennessee. I’ll need to get over your way some time and check them out.

Anyway Neil, I’m copying this email to Ms. King as she may be interested in the fact that POB has at least one reader of the POB magazine here in Western Australia, the state that covers one third of the Australian land mass and which makes Texas look a rather small state of the U.S.A! If you ever want to take a trip “down under” and check out what surveyors do in this region, feel free to come on down and be my guest. In the meantime, make sure you watch out for those rattlesnakes; we’ve got local tiger snakes that are just as venomous!

John A. Jamieson, Licensed Surveyor