SurveyorSimstudent guide · when it is not doing what you expect
Why is it doing that?
Everything here is something a student has actually run into, and every answer was checked against what the software really does — not against what it ought to do. Where the two differ, this page says so. If your problem is signing in, that is all on Getting started and it is not repeated here.
It isn't doing what I expect
the kit is usually telling you why"I pressed Measure and nothing happened. It isn't even greyed out."
It answered you — look at the status line under the screen. Keys that are blocked by the state of your work stay live on purpose, because a dead key tells you nothing and a live one can tell you what is missing. The line names the first thing standing in your way, not all of them, so there is exactly one thing to go and do. On the Measure screen the three it can say, in that order, are "No job open — create one first.", "No station set up — run Set up first." and "No instrument height — measure the HI first." The line is not a message you dismiss: it is re-asked every update, so it clears itself the moment you fix the state. Some keys really are greyed — a blank key drawn as "—", and Page on a screen that has only one page.
"There's no 📟 Collector button, and my classmate still has her 📖 Field Book."
Two different switches, and neither is a fault. Your instructor can set an assignment to run without the handheld, and when they do the button is simply not on your screen — not greyed, not clickable, just absent. The field book is a separate setting, so a classmate keeping hers while your handheld is gone is exactly what that pair of settings does. ⚠ Nothing on screen says the handheld was withheld, which is why this looks like something broke on your machine. Two things worth knowing: the handheld is available unless an instructor chose otherwise, so this is the unusual case rather than the normal one; and in free play every tool is always there, so if a button is missing outside an assignment the cause is something else entirely.
"It keeps saying my point is control. I never marked anything as control."
You did, without a button for it: storing a station setup promotes the point you occupied, and the backsight too when you backsighted a point rather than an azimuth. Importing a point file does the same to every point in it. That is how this collector protects a job, not a definition of control — you do not set up on a point and orient off it unless you trust it, so from then on the job holds it still. ⚠ It does not make it control in the professional sense. Control is a point of known position, to a stated order, from a source you can name; a hub you happened to occupy is not that. After that the collector refuses to let a measured shot overwrite it ("Point 1 is control — a measured shot may not overwrite it. Store this as a new number.") or to delete it. Store your shot as a new point number; that is the answer the refusal is asking for.
"I swept the locator over the benchmark and got nothing."
Nothing is broken, and a real magnetic locator does the same thing. A published benchmark here is a brass cap, brass is non-ferrous, and the locator senses iron. It is not a weak reading — the cap is not in the instrument's world at all, so the meter sits at a hard 0% and the tone stays at its idle pitch. What it does find: an iron rod out to about 2.5 m, a magnetic nail to about 1.6 m, a 60d nail to about 1.2 m. Sweep for the iron, and reach for the shovel where the signal is strongest.
⚠ In the field you would not stop there. A real locator has a gain control: turn it down until the meter comes off its stop and the plateau shrinks to a point, and repeat until you can put your finger on the spot. This one has no gain knob, so cross-sweeping is as fine as it gets here. Do not let that become the habit.
"I held the brace key and the rod started swaying again."
That is stamina, and the cure is the opposite of what it feels like: let go. A brace held without pause runs out in 4 seconds, and when it runs out the rod eases back to full sway over about half a second. Stamina only refills while the key is up — about 6 seconds from empty to full, and the brace works again once it passes 30%, which is under 2 seconds of rest. ⚠ Keeping the key down after it slips is the one thing that guarantees it never comes back: stamina does not recover at all while you are still holding. Watch the gold arc on the Brace button, and brace in bursts around the moment the reading is taken. A full brace is not a perfect one either — it leaves about 7.5% of the sway. ⚠ Do not wave a range pole. Waving through plumb is a level rod technique, and only for leveling: the reading passes through a minimum at plumb, so the lowest number is the true one. A prism on a range pole has no such minimum — waving it just moves the prism about. Steady the pole; do not swing it.
"In free play I could see how far off I was. In the graded lab that column is gone."
Correct, and it is not something your instructor can switch back on. The Shot Log's Truth tick adds six columns — the true northing, easting and elevation, and your error in each — and it is available in free play and to an instructor walking their own lab, and to nobody in a graded attempt. The control is removed, not greyed: there is no disabled box to find, because a greyed "Truth" control would advertise that an answer key exists and that somebody else can see it. Exporting the CSV does not get around it either — in a graded attempt those six columns are dropped from the file rather than blanked. Your shots are still recorded in full; what is withheld is your view of the answer.
"My instructions collapsed by themselves when I opened the handheld."
The assignment panel folds itself whenever the handheld comes to share the same column of the screen — the two together are wider than a lab tablet, so one has to give. It is not a small-screen rule: drag the handheld left over the panel on a big monitor and it folds there too. ⚠ Nothing tells you it happened, and it is not remembered — only the title bar stays, with its arrow turned from ▾ to ▸. Press that arrow and the panel comes back over the handheld and stays; a tap deliberately outranks the automatic fold. Close or drag the handheld clear and it springs open on its own. Nothing is lost, and Submit is one tap away — it lives inside the folded part, which is exactly why the arrow is never disabled.
My number is wrong
usually the instrument, working as built"I shot every point carefully, once. My angles are still off by seconds."
At every Error setting except Zero, your seed deals you one telescope with two permanent faults: a horizontal collimation error and a vertical index error, each typically within ±20″ — that is two standard deviations, not a ceiling, so an unlucky seed can hand you more. They are the same for every shot you take and for every classmate on the same seed, so shooting more carefully cannot reduce them and neither can shooting again. Both flip sign when you change face, which is the whole reason direct-and-reverse exists: shoot the target on Face 1, plunge, turn about 180°, re-sight the same target and shoot Face 2, and the mean of the two removes both exactly. The handheld will do the mean for you — set Method to D/R and it stores the face mean and hands you the spread as your quality number. ⚠ In a graded assignment the Error setting is locked, so "switch to Zero" is not a route out. And a D/R set does not excuse a badly levelled instrument: a leaning standing axis does not flip with the face, so no amount of face-meaning removes it.
"I set Zero, so why are my 900 m elevations 5 cm low?"
Because curvature and refraction is geometry, not instrument error, and it is the one thing Zero does not switch off. The earth curves away under a level sight and the atmosphere bends the ray back down; the two do not cancel, and a long sight books low. The figure is 5.5 cm at 900 m, not 5. Add the correction to your reduced elevation:
"I flipped to Face 2 and the horizontal reading didn't move."
Right, and that is a real total station behaving correctly. Plunging turns the telescope over the trunnion axis; it does not turn the alidade, and the horizontal circle rides the alidade. The face number changes and the vertical reading changes — a Face 1 zenith angle of 90° becomes 270°, sweeping through the zenith as the telescope goes over — but the horizontal reading holds. Right after the plunge you are pointing about 180° away from your target. You swing the alidade round and re-sight it, and that is when the horizontal reading shows the 180° difference. The LCD says so as soon as the telescope settles: "Face 2 — turn 180° and re-sight".
"Every distance in free play reads a couple of millimetres long."
Two different faults look like this, and they behave in opposite ways — which one you have depends on whether the error grows with distance.
If it grows with distance, it is the atmosphere — here. ⚠ In the field it is one of three, and the other two bite harder: an EDM's own scale (frequency) error, which is why instruments go on a calibration baseline; and the combined grid factor, which is ground-versus-grid and is the one that catches people out for whole careers. All three grow with distance. This sim models only the first, so do not carry the shortcut away with you. The instrument ships set to its reference air — 12 °C and 1013.25 hPa — while the world has its own weather, and every slope distance is scaled by the difference. ⚠ A hot day reads SHORT, not long. A 35 °C day against the 12 °C default is about 23 ppm, which is 2.3 mm short at 100 m and 23 mm short at a kilometre; a −8 °C day is about the same size in the other direction and reads long. Most days barely move it: of the seven the seed can deal, only the hot and the cold one shift a 100 m distance by more than a millimetre. The cure is the real field procedure — read the day in Settings → Field conditions, then key that temperature and pressure into the telescope's MENU → EDM. Enter the true conditions and the error is zero — the model here is exactly reversible, so it cancels clean. ⚠ It never cancels clean in the field. You enter what your thermometer and barometer read at the instrument, and the ray does not travel through that air — it travels over hot ground, along a valley, across water. A few ppm always survive. That residual is why the practices exist: read both ends of the line, observe at the right time of day, and do not trust a long shot taken over a baking car park.
If it is the same few millimetres at every range, it is not the atmosphere — that is the EDM's zero offset, drawn once for your session, and there is no field to dial it out with. It is a systematic you measure and live with: shoot the published BM-1 to BM-2 baseline of 104.403 m and the difference is yours. Check the prism setting too — a prism that does not match the pole puts a constant offset on every distance in exactly the same way.
It didn't count
graded work only — free play scores nothing"I ran the whole level loop as told and got zero."
A graded levelling book is marked on four things, 25% each, and all four have to pass. Three of them are read from the cells you 🏷 tag: one tagged elevation per turning point, exactly one tagged closing elevation on the benchmark, and no turning point off by a blunder's worth. ⚠ The fourth is not a tag at all — it is the page itself: a title line and a sketch on the graph page. Tag every answer perfectly, leave the title line and the sketch out, and the best you can score is 75%. Nothing is inferred from where you wrote a number; an untagged cell is not marked, however right it is.
"I struck a wrong reading, wrote the correction next to it, and that answer still didn't count."
Striking a cell voids its 🏷 tag. The tag lives on the ink, so when the ink is struck the claim goes with it — a struck cell is not a corrected answer, it is no answer. The correction you wrote in the next cell is just a number until you tag it. This is the one place the sim does warn you: the checklist in your task panel unticks that answer straight away, and pressing Submit asks "Your book has 3 of 4 required answers tagged — untagged answers are not graded. Submit anyway?" Treat both as the reminder to go back and tag the replacement. Your records has the rule in full.
"I found the monument with the locator but got no credit — and lost a mark for how I found it."
Two separate things, and the second one is not true. Nothing deducts a mark for using the locator — the locator is how you find the cap and the shovel is how you prove it, and the exercise's own instructions tell you to use both. Recovery is scored on two lines, 50% each: every monument exposed by a dig, and a search that stayed economical. A monument counts as found when a hole you dug had its half-metre footprint over it, whatever depth you reached. Backfilling is safe — the grader reads every hole you ever dug, not the state of the site at hand-in, so you can leave it tidy. Deepening a hole that is still open costs nothing — but a spot you backfilled and then dug again counts as a second hole, because the record keeps both. The budget is three holes per monument.
"I wrote my page check and it balances. Does it count?"
Not for marks, and it has not since August. Write it anyway — it is good field discipline and the page has room for it. It stopped being graded because the check summed the columns by position, and on a three-wire page — upper, middle, lower, their sum and the mean, five rows for one sight — it added the wires and the sub-sums and the means all together. On the first real graded attempt it made a Σ BS of 86.590 where the true sum of the means was 12.370, and marked two arithmetically perfect pages wrong. What counts now is the 🏷 tag.
"My instructor fixed the assignment. Why is my score the old one?"
A score is worked out once, at the moment you press Submit, and stored. Changing the assignment afterwards does not touch it — nothing re-grades by itself. Your instructor can re-grade, one attempt or a whole section at a time, and they see the old score beside the new one before they apply it. So the answer is to ask them. One thing they may tell you: once anyone has started an assignment its site is locked, so if the fix was to the ground itself they have to publish a revised copy rather than change yours.
"My instructor mentioned a note on my submission."
Your instructor sometimes sees a short note beside a submission when something in the record looks unusual. It is a prompt to take a closer look, not an accusation, and it does not change your score — your percentage comes from the rubric lines and nothing else. You never see these notes; only your instructor does. If one has come up, the useful thing is to ask what they saw and talk them through how you worked. That is what it is for.
On a crew
these all come down to someone else's screen"I tagged all my elevations and only the chief's book got marked."
On a crew assignment one seat hands in for everyone: the crew chief. Their book, their tags and their reported distances are what the server reads, and then the resulting score is copied onto everyone's row. Nothing else of yours travels. The checklist in your task panel is reading your own book on your own screen, so a green tick there means you wrote it down, not that it was recorded for the crew. There is a banner where you type that says so. What you wrote is still yours — it stays in your field book, which is a document you keep all semester. If you are keeping the notes and you are not the chief, read your numbers out and have the chief enter them, or ask your instructor to name you chief.
"My partner raised the rod mid-set and nothing warned me."
Working alone, raising the pole raises a red chip telling the instrument its target height is stale. On a crew, a partner's pole raises nothing on your screen — deliberately, because that is how it goes in the field: you cannot see what the rodman did to their own rod. If you are the observer, ask before the set and check the height at the end of it. Two limits worth knowing: the chip only ever watches the range pole at a total station, so a levelling run with the rod never raises one at all; and if you are the rodman, raising your own pole does chip you normally.
"The handheld won't let me type anything."
One seat owns the job: the collector, or the observer when there is no collector seated. Everyone else is read-only, and the handheld's status line says which seat it is — "The collector owns the job in this crew — ask them to change it." Strictly the boxes are not locked: you can type, and it is the button that refuses, naming the seat. Only New Job and Reopen are actually greyed. Working alone, none of this applies.
Things we already know are wrong
so you do not read our bug as your mistakeNothing is on this list right now. When we know of a fault you can see in your own work, it goes here, so you do not take it for your mistake.
Here, ten reads divide the whole error by √10, so averaging always pays. A real EDM's error is not all random: the additive constant and the cyclic error repeat identically on every read, so they survive any amount of averaging. Only the random part comes down. That is why instruments are checked on a calibration baseline instead of just measured more times.
Somewhere else in the guide
you searched for the symptom, not the chapterThese come up as often as anything above, and they are already answered properly elsewhere. One line each, and a link.
| If this is what happened | Read |
|---|---|
| "I typed a number and now I can't change it." | Committed ink cannot be edited — strike it and write the correction beside it. If the cell was tagged, tag the new one too: the strike voids the tag. Your records — ink, and the strike |
| "I can't find the 🏷 button." | It only appears when five things are true at once. Your records — the five conditions |
| "My shots aren't in my field book." | They were never going to be — your work lives in three places and nothing is copied between them. Your records — the three records |
| "I can't sign in." | Every sign-in failure, and what your instructor can fix. Getting started — when something has gone wrong |
| "There's no instrument standing ready." | You carry one out and set it up yourself; that is the exercise. Getting started — your first setup |
| "Which key braces the rod?" | Space, and hold it — not F. Controls — in the field |
| "I can't take the level rod." | The rods are the rodman's. Press C to become the rodman, then take it. Controls — in the field |