SurveyorSim

student guide · the exercises

What each exercise is asking you to do

Seven kinds of assignment ship with SurveyorSim. Your instructor sets the numbers — how many points, how tight the tolerance, what the site looks like — so this page does not quote any of those. What it gives you is the shape of each exercise and the one thing students most often get wrong in it.

Before any of them

true of every exercise
  • The task panel is the assignment. It carries the objective, the tolerance you are being held to, and a numbered What to do list. Those numbers are your instructor's, not this page's.
  • The names are your instructor's too. Marks called BM-A or CTL-1 are what the sim invents when nobody has authored a site. On a site your instructor drew, the marks carry whatever names they typed.
  • Kit can be withheld, and nothing on screen says so. If a button you expected — the shot log, the calculator, the data collector — is not there, your instructor took it out of your kit on purpose for this assignment. It is not a broken page, and the sim will not name what is gone. Work with the kit you have.
  • On a crew, only the chief hands in. Whatever you type on your own screen stays on your own screen.
  • Submit is final, and you are asked to confirm it. If a banner ever says nothing is being saved, stop and tell your instructor — that one is not recoverable.
Some results are flagged for your instructor. Work that looks too good to be true is noted for them — a chained distance that matches the truth to a thousandth of a foot, or monuments recovered without taking a single shot. You never see these notes, and they do not change your score. They are notes, not accusations, and the way to avoid them is to do the work.
№ 1

Differential leveling loop

the one graded from your book

Run a level loop over the benchmarks and close within the order tolerance.

Set the level, read a backsight, walk it forward turning point by turning point, and close. The instrument is an automatic level: its setup is shorter than the total station's — legs and bubble, and the compensator does the rest. No plummet, no instrument height to measure.

This is the exercise graded from your field book, and only from the entries you tag. The step-by-step instructions do not mention tagging. Read Tagging — how an answer counts before your first run, not after your first grade.
  • Your allowance is not a fixed number. It grows with the length of the loop you actually walk, and it stops shrinking at one graduation of the rod.
  • A loop closes on the benchmark it started from. Some runs instead finish on a different benchmark — that is a link, not a loop. Either way your closing tag goes on the benchmark you finished at, and tagging the one you started from is graded against the wrong published elevation.
  • Your page also needs a title line, and the graph page a sketch. Nothing prompts you.
A closure of exactly zero is not treated as cheating. On a short, carefully run loop it is a perfectly ordinary result. It is uncommon enough that a note goes to your instructor saying so — that is a remark, not a suspicion. Never fudge a number to avoid it.
№ 2

Closed traverse

occupation, not just angles

Occupy the control points, turn the angles, close the loop, and fix each point to the required accuracy.

Set up over each control point in turn, backsight the previous one, turn the angle to the next, and measure the distance. Shoot both faces and mean them — that is what cancels the instrument's collimation and index error. On a real instrument it is not your only defence: those corrections are determined on site and stored, and repeating the angle on several circle positions beats down what face-meaning leaves behind.

Three things are graded, equally:

  • Every control point occupied. The instrument has to stand over each one. Shooting a point from somewhere else is not occupying it.
  • The loop closed. Your closing sight back on the start, against the coordinate on its sign, over the length of the loop — the same misclosure you compute yourself. The loop is the chain your coordinates were carried round, so every control point has to be in it.
  • Every point in position. Each control point against where it truly is.
One setup that shoots every point fails this. It can land every point well — one short shot from known control is accurate — but it occupies nothing and closes nothing. So can shooting every point from the start and then walking round: your last point came straight from the start, not round the loop.

Your standard is on the task panel, and both the closure and the positions are held to it. The two can disagree, and that is a lesson, not an error: a loop can close well and still sit turned or stretched as a whole. The closure is the check you can make standing on the site, and it is the one your instructor will ask about.

№ 3

Chaining / taping

a foot tape, always

Chain between the set marks and report each measured horizontal distance.

Take the tape from your kit and measure between the marks, then report each distance in the task panel. On broken ground you will need to break the chain — level the tape in stages rather than dragging it down a slope.

The chain is a foot tape and the boxes are feet — whatever unit the rest of your class reports in. This one catches people out every year. Do not convert.
Set the pin while the tension is on. A tape reads its true length only under the standard pull. Let the pull off and the tape shortens and sags, so a pin set on a slack tape marks short — and every bay after it carries the same error the same way down the line. Come up to tension, hold it, mark, and only then release.

Feedback on each leg tells you the direction only: within tolerance, too long, too short, or not reported. It never tells you by how much, on purpose — that would hand you the answer.

№ 4

Monument recovery

the shovel is graded too

Turn the record angles and distances from control, then dig to recover the monuments.

The rodman sweeping with the magnetic locator, a green search ring on the ground ahead of the wand. The heads-up display shows a part-filled Locator signal meter and a Dig here button.
recovery is sweep, then dig — the meter guides the search, it is not the credit

You are given record measurements from known control. Turn them, walk out to where the monument should be, and dig. The monument is really under the ground — finding it is the exercise.

You pass by exposing the monument, not by standing near it. The search radius on your panel is advice about where to look. It is not the standard you are marked against.
  • Your digs are counted, and the count is a graded line. Digging a trench across the site is not a strategy.
  • Backfilling does not hide a hole. The record of where you dug is kept either way.
№ 5

Stakeout

judged on your worst stake

Stake the design points within radial tolerance of their true positions.

The design coordinates are on the task panel, in a section headed Design points. Set up, compute or read off the direction and distance to each, and put a stake in the ground.

Your grade quotes the worst stake, not the average. Nine good ones do not carry a bad one, and every rubric line has to pass. If you know one is loose, fix that one.
№ 6

Topographic survey

coverage is the exercise

Map the ground inside the marked square: shoot enough well-placed points that a contour map could be drawn from them.

Radiate from published control and shoot the ground — breaks in slope, the tops and bottoms of banks, and enough of the flat between them that a contour could be drawn through your points.

  • Coverage is checked cell by cell. A cluster of shots in one corner and a bare patch elsewhere fails, however many shots you took.
  • Only shots inside the square count. The corner stakes are the boundary of the job, not decoration.
Your vertical work is judged against a mapping standard, not against a levelling one — it is about whether a contour drawn from your points would be believable at the interval you were given.
№ 7

Open world

your instructor sets the task

An open-ended session on a site your instructor has built. The task is not in the sim — it is on their handout, or on notes placed around the site itself. The panel still gives you steps, and they are about finding the task rather than doing it.

  • Walk into a note to read it. Notes are placed on the ground and open when you reach them.
  • The notes may be in order. On some sites note 2 will not open until you have walked into note 1. If a note seems dead, you have probably skipped one.
  • Nobody grades this automatically. Your instructor reads the record and assesses it themselves — so what you leave behind in the field book and the collector is the whole submission.
What is recorded is which notes you entered, along with the same field book, site snapshot and shot record every other exercise keeps. Where you walked in between is not tracked.
Next: Your records covers the field book, tagging and the collector. Getting started covers signing in and your first shot.