WORST PRACTICES IN SURVEYING
At first I was fascinated with the facts about E-village, imagining first hand contact with virtual nature where life breaths codes in "1s and 0s" , like a real earth village, footprints of men with their families going to farm and young girls on their way to the stream... I was thinking electronic footprints.
The E-world to this our dispensation, is a dream come true, like an average Nigerian wanting to leave the shores of the country.
Only a few really care about Internet user privacy issues or the agreement terms attached to applications.
Somewhere in Africa, animal trails are being track, sand prints of human feet, bicycle, motorcycles and vehicle tyres are been tracked. To make spatial sense out of their services, product and business generally, smart phone manufacturers have embedded the GPS system in their gadgets.
The point really is to bring to our notice the spatial implications of life in an E-village.
Smartphone GPS in this parts of the world are used(misguidedly) by professional practitioners for uses they are not meant for.
We're still campaigning against the illicit use of hand-held gps for surveying practices,and some are downloading GPS mobile apps for such reason.
If they really understand surveying from the perspective of "positioning and navigation framework", they'll rethink their actions.
A smartphone gps determines its position from navigation satellite, WiFi networks, and cellphone receiver towers.
While the latter two improve usability of smartphones in dictating user positions, they don't improve accuracy of a position.
The smartphone gps, like data logger and handheld GPS, make up the user (receiver) segment when it's in use.
Although, a smartphone as an electromagnetic device that broadcasts and receives wave signal, It (the antenna) is not sophisticated enough to receive the very weak signals from gps satellites after interference with ionospheric and atmospheric conditions.
This is one major loophole in using a smartphone GPS... THE ERROR IS TOO BAD FOR SOME SURVEYING PRACTICE.