Trimble Geospatial Podcast

The Trimble Geospatial Podcast is the company's own audio channel for its geospatial work, and it sounds like it: practical, product-literate and more interested in workflows than personalities. It has two kinds of episode. One is the interview, where Trimble staff and outside guests talk about where surveying and mapping technology is heading. The other is the software session, which moves at the pace of a training room. 'Creating Custom Reports in TBC' is the clearest example. It starts from a common complaint, that photos taken on data collectors get attached to points and then get lost, and builds a report template that puts a control point's approach photo, a close-up of the monument, the coordinates and the county on a single page. Later the presenter changes a report editor setting so a point list runs continuously instead of one point per page, and jokes about sparing the trees. 'TBC Power Hour: Field to Finish with Confidence' pairs Joe Blecka, the TBC product manager, with Adam, a guest presenter studying geomatics engineering at the University of New Brunswick. Its sharpest moment comes when a red flag disappears after an observation is disabled, and Adam points out that the problem has only been ignored, not solved. The interviews cover wider ground. Dan Colbert and his colleague Jeff, in a conversation that begins as an episode of Field Notes, go through GNSS mission planning: sky plots, satellite dilution of precision, space weather such as geomagnetic storms, and the choice between radio, internet, satellite or post-processed corrections. Colbert's larger claim is that inexpensive components can make anyone in an organisation a capable data collector. Nathan Patton, a Product Marketing Manager at Trimble, tells Nick Ibsen that construction has been building the industrial metaverse for a long time, and that the hard problem is data: its volume, its storage, and getting the right piece to the right person between field and office. When asked what holds adoption back, the answer amounts to all of the above. On the MapScaping Podcast, Gregor Willhauck, who is responsible for cloud strategy in Trimble's geospatial division, makes the case for hosting digital twins centrally. He also describes marking up model clashes in virtual reality on site, and notes that work on standard formats is under way. Education gets its turn as well. Amy Northcutt, Trimble's Director of Education and Outreach, talks with Peta Cox of Consulting Surveyors National in Australia about training gaps, reaching high school students and more women coming into surveying. For a TBC user, the custom reports session is the most useful place to start. For the bigger picture, start with the digital twins conversation. Either way, the substance is concrete: settings, satellites and data pipelines, explained by the people building the tools.