Surveying Our Farm Water Scheme

On Saturday just gone Shayne from Forbes came out to the farm out our request to survey the pipeline and associated infrastructure that constitute our on-farm stock and house water set-ups. He uses digital equipment that draws on satellites and a base station, and will provide us with a digital file that will enable us and those that follow to accurately locate the pipeline in case of need. This is to some a discretionary and unnecessary exercise but we've heard countless stories of farmers who for various reasons need to locate pipelines on their farms and struggle; resulting in some cases in having to actually lay new lines when they may not have had to do so.
In this photo you can see the antenna (left), rover (leaning against the wooden post) and base station.

The antenna and base station are powered by the large battery you can see near the base of the antenna. The base station is positioned directly over a semi-permanent marker that can be re-used in case of need. This marker is a galvanised iron short star post hit in to level with the ground surface and has had a depression placed on the top of it using a hole punch.
The 'rover' is mobile and has a pole on the bottom that can be removed when appropriate to help make sure accurate elevation (metres above sea level) recordings are taken.

In this next photo you can see Shayne at the back of Ochre Arch (Weddin Mountain in the background) setting up a second semi-permanent marker, which in this case is a wooden square section 'dumpy' that has been hit into the ground and a galvanised nail hit into the top as a centre.
At the semi-permanent marker locations Shayne sets the equipment up to run for quite some time (3 minutes) to allow for much more accurate coordinate and elevation recording.

This next photo gives a better view of the semi-permanent marker. You can see how Shayne has stabilised the rover on top of the centre-point using a support stand.

In this final photo you can see Shayne putting his quad bike back on the specially designed trailer he has for transporting it. Pretty neat, actually.