I am two days into the four day NGS ‘OPUS Projects’ training being held in at the Corbin VA observatory. Wow, this is cool.
Located next to Fort AP Hill the Corbin Training center which also houses the Fredericksburg Magnetic Observatory.
The NGS Antenna calibration piers are out back:
Thats the robotic absolute calibration fixture on the right in the foreground.
Anyway, back to ‘NGS OPUS Projects.’ OP is going to change the way we all do control going forward. It will take me awhile to digest everything but here are some high points:
o OP has been around for a 1/2 decade
o OP is a piece of cake to submit observation files to using the existing OPUS web submission page. (You can have your crews submit files directly from the field.)
o OP allows you to delegate functions: crews can submit and attribute shots; sessions can be administered by a project leader and the final adjustment can be performed by the manager.
o OP will magically fix observations. I have test files that only use 80% of the observations and have 60% fixed observations when processed in OPUS. Running the same files in OP, with other nearby observations results in 98% used and 90% fixed. Magic.
o OP takes care of all the framing issues. Everything is processed internally in IGS08 (or whatever the latest frame might be.) Then OP converts to NAD83-2011.
o OP is easy to use. Really easy to use.
o OP is free.
o I trust OP. Today I ran a fairly large job that encompassed 3-days, 24-hour observations for 5 south western utah TURN stations. I processed against 8 CORS sites. Results look excellent. Then I unconstrained all but one of the CORS sites and everything still fell into place (within +/- 1 cm.)
o OP does all of the dirty work for Bluebooking (that’s tomorrow!)
o OP generates some killer reports.
o OP is going to come out of beta in September (maybe, probably.)
In any case, you’re going to hear a lot about OPUS Projects over the next year. It is the real deal and it (if you doing work with accurate positions) it is going to change the way you do things. OP is going to save you time. OP is going to produce a better work product. In short, I think that OP is going to significantly change geodetics in the United States. And since it works anywhere, I suppose the world.
iG GPS 