I am the recent proud owner of an LQTS-522. I have owned several total stations in the past, mostly Nikon (I worked for Nikon Surveying writing microprocessor code briefly.)
It is a surprisingly good gun. Distance measurement without a prism or other reflector is more discriminating than with your average Topcon; angles close to within optical margins (a couple / few seconds); the plate is actually rounder than in many of the Nikons I have owned.
The instrument comes with a CD that contains software to download data from the instrument, and a kind of "simulator" that can only have limited use. The download software sort of works, but writes an ascii file format that looks like other formats, but isn't. Among other things, even when the units setting on the instrument is set to US Feet, the distances downloaded are in meters. Hmm. (Yes, it would be possible to write a little C program to read in the LQTS file and turn it into a Fieldbook file, or an RW5 file, or something else lingua franca, multiplying by 3.2808.... But that is somewhat an odd affair.) I have sent e-mail to the Chinese company that makes the instrument, asking for a format specification for communication with the gun. So far to no avail.
Would there be someone out there who knows the data format specification for the LQTS-522? Who would be willing to share?
For any other questions about the instrument: Benjamin Reeve / breeve@gmail.com
1 comments:
Mr. Reeve,
Is your ultimate intention to extract an ascii data file that resembles a
TDS raw data file (*.rw5) with angle and distance, or, are you after an
ascii coordinate list?
I have bumped into this identical scenario before but with a Sokkia
instrument. We had a burglary in the office I worked in and the thieves had
taken all the data collectors that were in the office but had not found the
instruments which were stored in a seperate building. End result was that we
had five crews that were forced to use the Sokkia onboard data collection
for two weeks and likewise with the drafting department to reduce this funky
raw data. We had a couple of seats of Microstation with Geopack and Geopack
had the capability to read the Sokkia raw instrument output file. My best
recollection is that the Sokkia instrument file output was in meters and
grads or gons with a tab delimiter between the data fields.
Currently I use Microsurvey 2008 which will apparently directly read in
several different flavors of Nikon instrument raw data.
Best regards,
Adam Vest
adam.vest@calhar.com
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