Darlene Gillis, senior Global Positioning System (GPS) consultant with Geoplan Consultants Inc., in Fredericton will be the guest speaker at an information session - "The Potential of GPS" on Wednesday, April 17 at 7:00 pm in the Valiant Room of the Prince Edward Hotel. Gillis will also be available for media interviews on Thursday, April 18 at 10:00 am in the Geomatics Information Centre, first floor, Jones Building in Charlottetown.
Gillis is helping the Maritime provinces make the transition from a conventional survey control system to a GPS-based referencing system. Survey control is a system of "monuments" with known coordinates assigned to them. Coordinates may be described in terms of degrees of latitude north or south from the equator, and longitude east or west of the Greenwich meridian.
Since the early 1950s, Prince Edward Island has used a survey control system of more than 4,000 monuments. Consisting mainly of brass plugs mounted on concrete pillars, these monuments are used as points of reference for land surveyors, engineers, environmentalists and others.
While this system has served the province well for more than 40 years, technological advances and the demand for a more accurate system have led to the development of the Prince Edward Island High Precision Network of 1995 or
PEIHPN 95. It will run parallel with the existing system. The PEIHPN 95, which consists of 23 monuments, was developed from computations based on the Canadian Spatial Reference System to ensure compatibility with other systems across the continent.
This new survey control infrastructure will enable private and public sector enterprises to capture information with the use of more efficient technologies such as GPS. A Global Positioning System is a satellite-based positioning system that consists of portable receivers tracking a series of GPS satellites to compute positions. Survey engineers at Strait Crossing, for example, have developed their own survey control to ensure a higher degree of accuracy than what could be achieved by using other existing provincial control systems. Most of their positioning techniques involve GPS to help the Svanen crane position bridge components to within centimetres.