How to Use the Total Station

This video goes over how to use the TopConn Total Station for taking measurements at our dig sites

This video goes over how to use the total station once it's set up, including:

• Setting the north back set

• Focusing on the "Staff of Ra"

• Shooting the laser

• Switching between feet and meters

• Recording

  • Slope distance

  • Horizontal angle

  • Vertical angle

Transcript

Hello, today we are going to be using the total station. So to save time we've already set it up. Let me show you through the little eye thing. Dustin's got a light on our fancy datum stake. If we look through here you can see the crosshairs, the little circle is on our datum stake. So we are where we're supposed to be. We are all level on all levels. First things first, we're gonna plug her in and we're gonna set our North backset, which is the stake - we have a fancy piece of tape again.

You can see right now the numbers are reading nonsense. So we are going to use a little trick. At the base of the total station is this little triangle. That's the view that you get when you look through here. So we're going to swivel this around until we find Dustin. We've gotten very close. Now what I'm going to do is use this, this swivels us horizontally, and then this is the fine tuning. And we can also swivel vertically. And then this is the fine tuning. This is the focus for the viewfinder. So you see we can change the focus, and that's using this here. So I'm gonna focus on the mirror.

Let me show you the mirror to the viewfinder. There it is, you can see the crosshairs are on the mirror. This is a special mirror that will reflect no matter what angle you hit it at. So we should be good.

To set everything to zero, you're going to press this red button that says "zero set". After you set that to zero, you then have to set vertical to zero and you do that by just taking that up and down. So now if you look, our numbers are zeroes, which is what we want. Now we're going to shoot in a bone. We found a super rare juvenile hadrosaur radius in this museum. See Dustin is setting the data or the staff would draw directly on the bone. We have another video where we go over how to take data points and what data is relevant needs to be collected. But for today's purposes, we're just shooting one point on this bone. So again, I'm going to use that triangle to get as close as I can to the near And then I'm gonna look through here and just the focus because closer and fine tune everything

You can see we are on the mirror again, shoot that in, we are going to press this button, it's got a little white dot on it, it also says measure track. That's what fires the laser.

Dustin, Are You Ready? Aim, fire. And then there's like a little loading sign there.

And there we go. It's thinking about it, it's thinking about it. Ah, we got to point.

You can relax, Dustin. We are in feet, but, we take our data in meters. So we just need to press this little hidden button on the end. You can see that switches meters and feet. We just need to press that. And now we are in meters. Now we have a super fancy journal.

What we want is the slope distance. There's a little triangle here. Right now it's just the horizontal distance, we want the hypotenuse.

We're going to press this button with the little triangle. Until it shows the hypotenuse. Then that's the number I'm going to read off to Maya; 3.815. That's recorded under slope distance. Now we're gonna go to the horizontal angle.

Once we go to horizontal angle, you lose the slope distance. So make sure that this is correct. Meaning that you took the right number with meters and the hypotenuse. Just switch to the horizontal angle. You're gonna press this button here, the "H".

And now we have a new number. Now these are polar coordinates. It's three to 328.43.45. So that's 328 degrees, 43 minutes, 45 seconds. Then we want our vertical angle. We're going to press that again. Notice the "H" is going to turn to "V". So this is 90.04.35. So 90 degrees, 4 minutes, 35 seconds.

Let's see she Maya has written it oh so nicely. In each of its little boxes, then we have our specimen ID.

Troubleshooting

If you run into trouble, 90% of the time turning of the machine and turning it on again resolves the issue. Unless, you drop it. Don't do that.

That's the basics of the total station!