Cicilia Friberg and Per Olsson work as surveyors for the Stenungsunds community in Sweden. In only 50 years Stenungsund has changed from a quiet summer resort into a regional business centre. The population today is four times what it used to be. With this constant expansion it is up to the local surveying department to keep all the survey data on this developing region up-to-date.
{sidebar id=184 align=right} “Stenungsund is a 23.000 people community which covers an area of 254 square kilometres and is situated North of Gothenburg. The city started out as a summer town where people would go to the beach and they would only live here during the summer months”, Friberg states. “The harbor town is surrounded by several smaller islands and a lot of forests.” This makes Stenungsund a fantastic environment for outdoor life with the archipelago and salt water in the west and woods and fresh water lakes in the east.
Open and green space
In the industrialized nearby city of Gothenburg there is not a lot of free space for young people to live, so a lot of them have moved to Stenungsund. 4,000 People commute to their work in Stenungsund daily. Almost as many have chosen to settle in Stenungsund and commute elsewhere. “Every day they drive 45 minutes to their work, but they do have a lot more open and green space to live here. The region is certainly growing.” Looking out over the wide harbor and the forested islands that surround it, it is hard to disagree.
The right information
The area the 28 employee surveying department has to cover is quite spread out and includes an island. “We set out and map the area of the community, but also offer maps of the infrastructure like the pipelines for water and the buildings. The area consists of several small islands and also there are still a lot of uninhabited forests and hills surrounding us. For this spread out community we put the boundaries down so people have the right information, if they want to buy some land. We basically offer the complete package of services: from the survey to the map.”
{sidebar id=186 align=left}Local government
She continues: “We are part of the local government and as such have a building office which puts money into the community.” The Municipalities of Sweden (kommun) are the local government entities. The current 290 municipalities form sub-divisions to the 21 Counties of Sweden (Län). All municipalities are of a uniform type.
At the centre
“We have 28 Employees many of which are engineers like technical engineers, plan engineers and water engineers. They all need our services. We are at the centre of the entire engineering force, because they basically all need a map to do their work. For instance we are currently building a large project where we will build 350 new buildings, new roads and new pipes on the coast. All those projects eventually come back to the level of the map.”
Clearly see the points
Doing a survey for this whole area is a big challenge. “For us to find the right points on the ground and to use these as points for the map can be difficult. Because there are so many hills and deep forests it can be hard to get a bearing. We work with two {sidebar id=187 align=right}pieces of Topcon’s HiPer GPS and one total station; the GPT-9003A. We have had the Topcon instruments for one year now. We use the Total Station on the pipelines and heights. We chose Topcon for the ease. It is easier to handle than other products. You can clearly see all the points on the display. You have a map with you where you can see where you are at. We use the GPS for setting out points and check the height with the Total Station.”
An easy choice
“The GPT 9003A was an easy choice for us. We were looking for a piece of quality and it is user friendly. It is very important that it is user friendly, because not everybody that works with it here is a surveyor. One of the advantages is that the files are easily interchangeable from the GPS to the Total Station as we work with the same data collector in between; the Topcon FC-200 with radio. It basically offers us one user interface. The data collector software on the GPS and on the Total Station can give a complete view of the map. Between these systems it is easy to move files.”
Dimitri Lambermont is a Technical Writer for Topcon Europe Positioning B.V., The Netherlands.
