Traverses

A survey isn’t just data. Or just drawings. Or just COGO. Or just any ONE thing. It’s the combination of record data, field data, intersections, curves, stations, offsets, control points, side shots, closing points, areas, corner notes, cut sheets, legal descriptions, contours, geodetic positions, setbacks and the list goes on.

So how do you keep track of something as complex as a survey? Traverses!

A Traverse is any group of points that belong together. A Traverse can define a lot boundary or a feature line on a map or a group of points you want to download to your data collector. Traverses can be rotated and translated, copied and duplicated, turned on or off in a drawing, adjusted — and the list goes on.

Best of all, Traverses can share data. Update a point in one Traverse and it updates everywhere. Once you start working with Traverses in your survey you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.

The Benefit of Traverses

Traverses allow us to operate on large numbers of points with single commands. Take rotation for instance. Just tell TPC to rotate a traverse about a point and every point in the traverse gets rotated. Or how about selecting the five traverses that aren't on the survey grid and rotating all five togther to put them on grid.

Do you get the picture? Traverses are the perfect way to manage your survey points in an orderly, defined fashion. The result is that you work efficiently and decisively with your survey data via traverses.

Traverse Rules

A survey can have as few or as many Traverses as you want. If you are working with a subdivision, you will probably have a traverse for each lot in the subdivision. If you are staking out points on a construction project, you might have a Traverse for each building and one for miscellaneous points.

Keep in mind that you can always create additional traverses by recalling points from the survey. If you want to do something with selected points, just recall those points into a traverse and do it – at any time.

Some things you should know about Traverses

· A survey can have any number of Traverses.

· A Traverse can have any number of points.

· When a new point is entered in a Traverse it becomes part of the survey.

· Any Traverse can access (recall and change) any point in the survey.

· If a point is changed in one Traverse, that change is reflected in every other Traverse that shares that point.

· Traverses can be easily created from most of the views.

Traverse Settings

Traverse Settings make drafting fast, flexible and fun in TPC. Use the Traverse Settings to choose the point symbol, line type, color, point labels, line labels and other settings you want to use for a traverse and TPC creates the drawing for you. You can store Traverse Settings for re-use by giving them a unique name like Property Line or Topo Shots.

Managing Traverses

From the TPC Desktop menu, choose Manage | Traverses. TPC displays the Traverses Manager.

You can insert new traverses next to other traverses or append them to the end of the list. You can group similar traverses together. Make a copy of a traverse that shares the same survey points or duplicate a traverse so that it has its own unique survey points.

Most of the time however, you’ll just double click a traverse to open it in a Traverse View.

Traverse View

The Traverse View manages a traverse. You can enter, edit or recall points, change data entry formats, view and print the traverse.

You format the Traverse View to include the column sequence you want. Now enter your data and watch asTPC computes the points for you. Or recall existing points into a traverse to see their relationships (inverses). Display each point in a single row (as shown here) or use two rows per points like a conventional field book.