Trig pillars may look like relics, but the UK’s national mapping agency still maintains and provides access to the national mapping and geodetic network.
The modern counterpart is OS Net — a network of about 110 GNSS receivers operated by Ordnance Survey. British surveyors use it daily to position new data within a few centimeters. What took hours in 1936 is now done in seconds, with far higher accuracy.
OS Net data streams are used to compute real-time corrections to deliver centimeter-level positioning with RTK GNSS and to position aircraft for aerial photography.
Technology has shrunk the surveyor’s toolkit: instead of heavy theodolites, tapes and total stations carried by field crews, a modern surveyor often works solo with a tablet and a geodetic GNSS receiver via Bluetooth.
Of course, in urban “canyons” a GNSS receiver may not see enough satellites, so backup tools like a laser distance meter or even a 20 m tape still help ensure data quality.
After collecting new points, surveyors connect them on the tablet to form true feature shapes, then attribute semantics (road edge, obstacle, private garden, facade) so clients can use the data.
Jobs are then sent to head-office servers for processing and merged into a nationwide map for customers.
A similar network in Ukraine is called System.Net. For access, contact our managers: (044) 369-50-21, (050) 388-13-21, (067) 217-09-63. Original OS article: link.