Soil investigation produces points by the hundreds: boreholes, trial pits, groundwater wells, monitoring instruments. Every one of them needs a position, and every one of them needs to be found again, sometimes years later, by someone who was not there the first time. GPS for soil investigation makes both ends of that problem small.
How it works in the field
The field worker carries a UNI-GR2 on the pole next to the drilling equipment. Each borehole, sample point or monitoring well is measured with a centimetre-accurate RTK position at the moment it is made. The positions sync to UNI-Cloud and travel with the rest of the field data to the office.
The height component deserves emphasis. In geotechnics the Z matters as much as the X and Y: a groundwater level or a settlement measurement is only meaningful against a reliable reference height, and RTK delivers one at every point without a separate levelling run.
For teams that record their fieldwork in TerraIndex, the route is short: connect the receiver over Bluetooth and select it as your position source in TerraIndex, so the borehole description and its exact position are joined from the first moment.
Who already works this way
Fugro carries out soil investigation with digital surveying, positioning its fieldwork with marXact equipment. In geomonitoring, where settlement bolts and gauges are read for months or years, measured instrument positions are what keep a time series trustworthy: the technician stands at the same point every round, provably.
What this looks like on site
Say an environmental consultancy investigates a former industrial site: 45 boreholes and 8 groundwater wells. Each point is measured as it is drilled, and the site plan draws itself from real positions. Two years later, the remediation contractor finds every well back within a shovel width, and the new monitoring rounds connect seamlessly to the old series. Nobody stands in a field holding a faded sketch against the horizon.
Getting started
You need one set per field team: receiver, app, cloud environment and RTK corrections, together in the UNI-Collect Survey Package. It works standalone with the UNI-Collect app, or connected to your soil investigation software.
Want to see it next to your own drilling rig? Contact us for a demo.