GPS/Mapping: Bikes Map Out a Future for GPS
An innovative bicycle data collection system is used to gather utility dat in North Carolina.
By Michael W. Michelsen, Jr.

There was a time when practically every American kid loaded up his or her bicycle with a playing card "motor," bells, a basket (saddlebags optional, of course) and that fancy tool bag that hung under the seat. We were the proudest things on two wheels. There are some kids that never seem to grow up, or get over the tendency to fancy up their bicycles - or so it seems.
     As part of its contract with a North Carolina utility, Vernon F. Meyer and Associates, Inc. (VFM), a surveying, planning, mapping, and geographic information systems (GIS) consulting firm based out of Sulphur, La., took this age-old tendency to new heights. It recently outfitted three mountain bicycles with Trimble Pro XR GPS units, which are being used to provide GIS data bases with information on nearly 80,000 telephone poles and 60,000 other service features to a telephone company in Charlotte, N.C.
     VFM proposed this innovative approach with leading-edge technology to meet Concord Telephone Company's (CTC, Concord, N.C.) needs and at the same time significantly reducing initial costs for their client. In a field of competing companies, VFM and Baymont Technologies Inc., walked away with a contract that has the potential for significantly higher earnings from their new and existing client base in local government and the private sector. "In the beginning of our company's history, a lot of our work was typical land based property location surveying. In the 1970s and 1980s, we moved into the world of mapping, hydrographic surveying and GIS. We also expanded into doing work for the federal government with large projects for the Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Geologic Survey," said Jay Arnold, vice president of GIS Services for the company. Now the firm supports several Corps of Engineers districts on land and in the water with six boats outfitted with Trimble GPS receivers for hydrographic surveys.

GPS Enters the Telephone Business
In the midst of deregulation and increased competition in the utilities business overall, CTC has realized it must better maintain and update its outside plant. CTC determined the best way to do this was with a full AM/FM GIS built on an Intergraph system, Arnold said. "They had the software and the infrastructure, now they needed data."
     As a result, VFM has been hired as a subcontractor to Baymont Technologies Inc., (Clearwater, Fla.) to perform the GPS field inventory for the utility. This inventory is collecting data on every piece of telephone service equipment located in the 650-square-mile area around Concord, N.C. The equipment in this inventory includes telephone poles, pedestals for underground lines, guy wires, manholes that connect underground systems and other equipment in the service area. "We need to map everything in the field for the telephone company's facility," said Jeff Lower, operations manager for the Gainesville office of VFM. "Needless to say, we know it is a big job."
     When the job is complete, users will be able to query and retrieve information from a data base that VFM's riders entered in the field. This will allow users to search the data base for poles by a given characteristic entered as a search term, giving users every single attribute about a particular pole. This information gives the utility a working and updatable GIS detailing equipment in the field and allows them to be much more efficient.

Tally-Ho!
When the companies were awarded the contract to perform the field inventory, they knew they were going to have to do something unique to accomplish the task. "The way we chose to do this was by using those customized mountain bicycles with [GPS] and TDC 1 data collectors mounted on the custom welded frames," Lower said.
     "We decided to use bicycles because we knew we were going to have to deal with the public a lot. We were going to be collecting data on the properties of Concord customers, as well as up and down the streets of rural and urban environments," Lower said. "We had to have a vehicle that allowed us to maneuver quickly up to a telephone pole or other piece of equipment, have a procedure for collecting the data, then leave the property without disturbing the citizens. An ATV or a truck would not work as effectively as the bicycle. In addition, bicycles are an environmentally-friendly method of collecting the data. It also gave us the opportunity to utilize the Pro XR Beacon technology and give our customer the submeter accuracy they needed.
     "We have three people riding bikes 10 hours a day, four days a week for two years, to cover about 3,000 miles of line," Lower commented. "That's approximately the distance from New York to Los Angeles." The project will allow the company to collect nearly 140,000 total features for the inventory, according to Arnold.

Designing the Data Dictionary
The level of detail required to make the inventory useful called for painstaking detail at the planning stages of designing the data dictionary in the GPS.
     "The data dictionary itself had to be not only useful and efficient for data gathering, it had to be something that Intergraph Framme could easily translate," Arnold said.
     The resulting proprietary data dictionary allows users at VFM to perform their inventory, perform a quality assurance control procedure, edit features with Trimble's Pathfinder Office post-processing software and deliver the data to Baymont Technologies for incorporation into Intergraph Framme.

GPS Need Only Apply
"There were a lot of ways to perform a utility inventory. Utility features could be mapped using traditional photogrammetry or perhaps terrestrial photogrammetry, but with the level of accuracy we needed, as well as the presence or many attributes that needed to be collected, GPS is the only way this project could have been done," Lower said. "All of the information that needs to be collected is in our data dictionary. We found the real-time sub-meter accuracy of the Pro XR a tremendous asset."

Another Job for Bikes
"We anticipate a healthy future for the use of our bikes," Lower said. "We are seeing more and more RFPs from AM/FM applications. Understandably, these applications will incorporate many of the same requirements as our job with the Concord Telephone Company did the high level of accuracy, customer as well as user-friendly method of data collecting, among other things."
     "We're proud of the bicycle data collection system," commented Jeremy A. Conner, marketing director for VFM. "When you think about things like collecting data, even with a GPS on a bicycle, it might seem routine, but when you consider how competitive the utilities business is, it is easy to understand how it became one more tool our clients can use to be that much more competitive."

About the Author:
Michael Michelsen, Jr. is a writer in the marketing communications department of Trimble Navigation in Sunnyvale, Calif. He may be reached at 408-481-8658 or via e-mail [email protected]

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