Welcome to the first issue of A Better Point of View, GeoDigital International’s monthly eNewsletter. These are certainly exciting times for our company. As Alastair mentioned, 2011 was a fantastic year and we believe 2012 will be even better.

The editorial team has selected 4 major industries – Utilities, Infrastructure, GEOINT and Geospatial as our primary groups for the coming year. Our plan is to publish 3 times per year for each industry. The main article in each issue will have a customer focus on an important, industry-specific topic.

As this is our Utilities issue we will focus on how GDI customers are using LiDAR in conjunction with PLS – CADD to better manage their power transmission lines and right of ways. When you see the value that a highly detailed 3D point cloud data brings to the analysis workflows it’s hard to imagine using any other approach.

You don’t want to miss this. GeoDigital is pleased to announce our LiDAR as Art contest.

The first winners will be showcased at ILMF 2012 in Denver, Colorado, January 23 – 25. To learn how your employer can earn money for their favorite charity, plus you can have the chance to win an iPad, please click on this link.

We wish you and your family an enjoyable Holiday Season and rest assured that GeoDigital will be working hard to provide you with A Better Point of View.

Removing Uncertainty in the Bid Process - Defining Structure, Corridor and Circuit Mileages
by David Wright 
Technical Sales Analyts, Geodigital International Inc. 

There are many pieces of information that contribute to determining the cost of an electrical transmission line LiDAR survey such as the voltage of a line of interest, whether the line runs through an urban or rural area and the width of corridor to be acquired and processed. One item that can sometime be overlooked is fully defining the total mileage of the following:

• corridor (aka right-of-way)
• structure (aka line or pole)
• circuit

The diagram below shows a classic example of the different types of mileages. The one on the left is a double-circuit, metal lattice structure, and on the right a single circuit, wooden H-Frame structure. The result is one ROW/corridor mile, two structure miles and three circuit miles – two for the metal lattice and one for the wooden structure.

Now how does this affect the cost of a LiDAR survey? It’s most likely the helicopter would fly following each structure line, so two, one mile flight passes to acquire the two structure miles. The LiDAR data would be lumped together from the two flight passes and prepped for feature coding and planimetric mapping based on one corridor mile. The feature coding (aka classification) of the entire corridor would occur to classify the various objects in the corridor according to the feature code list. This separates vegetation points from building, ground from roads, crossing lines from fences, etc. This wide-area feature coding is based on the corridor width requested and the length of the corridor miles in the survey.

The processing of the powerlines themselves is based on a combination of structure and circuit miles. For each structure line the LiDAR points from the tower need to be classified separately from the conductor and ground wires (aka shield). This task is more time consuming when there’s more than one circuit on the structure. Similarly for each circuit, roughly four attachment points (3 phases and a ground wire) need to be extracted. When it comes time to model the line in PLS-CADD, in order to perform a NERC clearance assessment as an example, the line is most frequently modeled based on each circuit or the total circuit mile.

Without providing a breakdown of these mileages, it is most often assumed by a LiDAR vendor that every mile is a single circuit line running in its own corridor. The more information that is provided by a utility on the total mileage breakdown by corridor, structure and circuit miles, the less uncertainty in bidding the work and therefore the lower the cost for performing the survey.

My name is Chuck Anderson. I was born in Wisconsin which is why I love to hunt, fish and yes I am a Green Bay Packer football fan. Is there any other NFL team? I have spent most of my career in the vegetation management field and currently manage the electric transmission utilities business for GDI. I support customers throughout North America and travel up to 60 to 70% of the time.

My favorite movie is Tombstone with Val Kilmer and Emilio Estevez. A good day at work for me is having a customer tell me they would hire GDI again if they had a “do-over” on another project with the same requirements.

The person I admire most is my grandmother. She defined toughness, grace and acceptance. She raised her family (9 children), mostly alone in an incredibly difficult financial situation. She never failed to find the goodness in all and left this earth at 94 still thinking about how to help others.

 Geodigital LinkedIn  Group LinkedIn  Geodigital Twitter