Yankee ingenuity

—by Michael Margolis

Dave Laferriere, fifth-generation New Englander and son of a Connecticut farming family, knows the virtue of economy. A veteran land surveyor, Laferriere, working out of Woodbury, Connecticut, recently decided to expand his surveying capabilities. When he did, he took particular care in choosing exactly the right equipment. His analysis led him to undertake field trials of several competing GPS solutions before settling on the single-frequency Magellan ProMark3. He found it would be the most cost-effective choice for achieving his goal: expanding his business while remaining an essentially a small, efficient operation.
He bought his first Magellan ProMark3s late in 2005, and he was not to be disappointed. “They’re so valuable they paid for themselves within a month,” he says. Preferring to keep it his “secret,” he somewhat reluctantly added, “The ProMark3 is one of my competitive advantages. It puts me ahead of the pack in so many ways. For example, it enables me to do jobs that larger firms should be doing, but I’m out there competing with them every step of the way.”
Laferriere uses the ProMark3 in three principal ways: in static setting control, kinematic stop-and-go topo work, and in GIS work. In fact, he’ll soon be starting work on challenging a contract to do the GIS for one of Connecticut’s larger towns.
Laferriere works throughout Connecticut, concentrating much of his work in the hilly, rural northwest corner of the state where old family farm parcels are being subdivided for housing.
In his twenty-eight years of surveying, since leaving the Navy as chief quartermaster, Laferriere has used and mastered virtually all types of surveying equipment. Now, the L1 Magellan ProMark3 has become a favorite because it’s so efficient and easy to use. “A monkey could do it,” he jokes.
Don’t be fooled, though. Laferriere knows his way around the world of GPS, and he’s convinced that knowledge is very important and that too few surveyors have it. For example, he’s a great believer in mission planning—knowing satellite configuration and Kp index—which he thinks is probably given too short a shrift by surveyors, often leading to frustratingly poor results.
Laferriere’s efficiency begins by bringing control to the job site with the ProMark3. “In Connecticut, our state monumentation has deteriorated pretty badly,” he says. “Much of it has been destroyed. We often need to go more than a few miles to tie the job into a NVGD 29 or NAVD 88 bench mark. Instead of taking a day to do this conventionally, I can do it much more efficiently with the ProMark3.”
Once control is on the job site, he or his assistant Chet Kasper can speedily perform the requisite number of stop-and-go measurements to produce either a two- or five-foot contour topographic map of the site. He points to initialization as something else that has been made simple and convenient with the ProMark3. “Magellan engineers have thought of everything and done a really good job making it a snap.”
Once he’s moving around, even in tree cover, Laferriere finds the ProMark3 seldom loses lock. “It amazes me how well the ProMark3 holds lock, even, for example, on the south side of a field where dense boundary foliage comes between the antenna and the satellite constellation.”