UAV Services Group Shares Our Experience with the Trimble® Catalyst™ software and GNSS receiver service

Recently, our UAV Services Group had the opportunity to trial some mobile mapping technology from Trimble and share the findings via a user review. The technology we selected was the new Trimble® Catalyst™ software and GNSS receiver service, which is designed to provide highly accurate positioning data into a smartphone or tablet.

This from Neill Jobe, CEO Geo Jobe, “We recently had the opportunity to test the new Trimble® Catalyst™ software and GNSS receiver service, which is designed to provide highly accurate positioning data into a smartphone or tablet. We are long-time Trimble users, so this was an opportunity to test their latest technology.” Essentially what Trimble has done is taken their core GNSS technology that runs on a hardware chip and created a software service that can run in an app on a smartphone or tablet. The user must select a monthly subscription based on the level of accuracy they want.

Seco pole with Trimble GNSS with Catalyst running on Android smartphone
Seco pole with Trimble GNSS with Catalyst running on Android smartphone

Trimble Catalyst requires three components:

  1. A location-enabled mobile app on an Android device
  2. A subscription to the Catalyst service
  3. A Trimble DA-1 antenna that plugs directly into an Android smartphone or tablet USB port

From our review article…

“We used Trimble Catalyst for a project with Wilson County Water Utility in Middle Tennessee,” said Jeff Lawrence (@jalaw3), sUAS Business Development, GEO Jobe UAV Services. “The utility had hundreds of newly installed meters and valves that had not yet been added to the GIS mapping and asset management system.”

Wilson County, as with much of the other 40 counties that comprise the middle third of the state known as Middle Tennessee, has been experiencing tremendous growth. GEO Jobe hosts and helps maintain the base GIS data for Wilson County Water Utility. GEO Jobe partnered with the water utility staff by using Catalyst to capture these “missing” meters and valves.

Trimble mobile manager software running on Motorola smartphone
Trimble mobile manager software running on Motorola smartphone

“Catalyst integrated directly and easily with Esri Collector,” stated Jeff. “As the field team navigated from location to location, Catalyst captured the new utility asset’s exact locations, while Collector created points and feature attributes in the GIS geodatabase in real time.” The results from Catalyst were quite impressive,” Jeff said. “The Catalyst coordinates were within .25-inch to less than 1-inch of the results from the surveyor.”

Continue reading the full article titled,  A User Review of Trimble Catalyst

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