Units / Scale

Unit Settings

The units and scale menu allows you to specify settings for your Project. Some of these settings are recorded in the raw file and the Project's INI file, as well as recorded in the MSurvey.ini file.

Notes:

The Distance Unit (Meters or Feet) and Angle Unit (Degrees, Radians, or Gons) can only be set when creating a new Project. After a Project has been created, these will remain greyed-out and cannot be changed.

You can set these settings as defaults for new Projects by pressing the Save as Default Settings button. The default settings can also be set in the Options screen.

Note: the actual precision on distances and angles returned from your instrument may be limited to less than the precision you select here. Selecting a higher precision here will not increase the precision of values queried from your instrument.

Distance Unit

Choose the distance unit that you will be using: Meters, International Feet, or US Survey Feet. All distances will be displayed in the selected format. All distances will be recorded to the raw file in decimal format. Database coordinates are always stored with 6 decimal places, and rounded to the desired precision for display.

Meters

If you choose Meters as your distance unit, you can also specify the number of decimal places to display within FieldGenius, from 0 to 6.

International Feet / US Survey Feet

If you choose International Feet or US Survey Feet, then you can specify to use either a decimal format with a precision from 0 to 6, or a Fractional format with feet and inches.

If you use the decimal format, distances will be displayed in decimal feet, such as 10.5' to indicate 10.5 feet or 10feet-6inches.

If you use the fractional format, distances will be displayed in feet and fractional inches, such as 10'6 1/2" to indicate 10feet-6.5inches or 10.54166667 feet.

Angle Unit

Choose the angular unit that you will be using: Degrees, Gons/Gradients, or Radians. All angular values written into the raw file will be recorded in the selected format.

Degrees

If you select Degrees, then you can also select which format to use, either DDD°MM'SS.s" for degrees-minutes-decimal seconds, DDD°MM.m' for degrees-decimal minutes, or DDD.d° for decimal degrees. You can also specify the number of decimal places to use, from 0 to 8.

Gons (Gradients)

If you select Gons (Gradients) then you can also specify the number of decimal places to use, from 0 to 8.

Radians

If you select Radians then you can also specify the number of decimal places to use, from 0 to 8.

Direction Format

Choose the direction format that you will be using: North Azimuth, South Azimuth, or Bearings. When entering a direction, you can always override this setting by entering the angle with the cardinal quadrant indicated before or after the angle. If there is no quadrant specified, then the input angle will be interpreted as an Azimuth.

Scale Factor

You can use a scale factor to adjust ground distances to grid distances.

Distances measured with a total station will be recorded in the raw file with the unscaled, true measured slope distance. This scale factor is applied to the computation of coordinates only.

Distances entered using the Traverse/Intersect tool (COGO) will be scaled by the scale factor.

Distances calculated using the Inverse tool, or recalled using the pt..pt format will be scaled by the inverse of this scale factor. The result will be the inversed grid distance times the inverse of the scale factor, so that the ground distance is returned.

This Scale Factor does not affect any GNSS measurements. Please see the GNSS Local Transformation topic for information on using a GNSS Scale Factor.

Curvature and Refraction Correction

When selected, the correction is applied to the computation of drawing coordinates only. Raw data will not be altered in any way. When available from your instrument, we recommend the use of that option and leave this setting toggled OFF in FieldGenius. Note: Be careful to not have this setting toggled ON in both your instrument AND FieldGenius.

Save As Default

Use this to permanently write the current settings to the MSurvey.ini file. When you create a new Project, it will use these settings. The default settings can also be set in the Options screen.