Page 32 - 2023 - 50.1

Lahontan Chapter In the meantime, Nevada Revised Statutes section 327
defines the unit of measurement as the U.S. Survey Foot.
Update Until such time that the Nevada Board of Professional
Engineers and Land Surveyors proposes change to legislation
to change the unit of measurement, or similar legislation to
By: Michael Detwiler, PLS recognize the new datum update, state statute remains the
same and we will be using the U.S. Survey Foot for at least a
The Lahontan Chapter kicked off 2023 with an energetic couple more years.
first meeting at La Posada Real Mexican Restaurant in
Reno with our guest speaker, 2023 NALS President Nancy Nevada GPS Network
Almanzan. Nancy swore in the new 2023 Lahontan Chapter
Officers and provided her outlook for the year. She also gave The Utah Geospatial Resource Center performed a system
a great explanation of what each NALS committee is working wide server upgrade in 2022 for their Reference Network
on for the current year. Examples include the conference (TURN). The next phase in that process is to move the Nevada
committee busily putting together the agenda for the NALS/ GPS Network onto the same cloud server. Due to legacy
CLSA conference in March, as well as public outreach and hardware and software configurations, the NAD83(1994)
legislative issues. datum will no longer be supported, and the Nevada GPS base
stations will begin to broadcast NAD83(2011) coordinates
We had several guests from Southern Nevada and the Las soon. Depending on areas of comparison in the state plane
Vegas area attend. We also saw a few younger faces as well projection, the difference in datums can be in the range
as old faces we hadn’t seen in many years. It was great to of 0.5-feet, horizontally. This is expected to take place
feel the energy of the new year. sometime in the spring or early summer of 2023. Please
keep an eye out for more information as NALS and UGRC will
Michael Smith also gave us an impromptu presentation and provide more details as they become available.
a request for help from the land surveying community, with
regards to helping preserve some historic General Land Help Wanted
Office field notes. These notes are unofficially called the
Settelmeyer notes and contain approximately 100 field books The Lahontan Chapter of the NALS is also actively working
of GLO surveys in northeast Nevada and small areas of Idaho with the UGRC on establishing and adding new locations
along the northern Nevada border. The Nevada Cadastral for base stations. The focus will be on densifying the
Office Section Chief, Wayne Strickland, would like to scan stations within southern Washoe County, western Churchill
and digitize these field books for a more permanent record County, Storey, Carson City, Douglas, and Lyon counties.
in the BLM office. After completion, these field books will be Additionally, establishing stations easterly along the I-80
preserved in the Elko County Museum. and US-50 corridor will allow the Nevada GPS to eventually
be integrated into the Utah TURN network. NALS welcomes
We will have our next chapter meeting on February 8 . We all private firms and public agencies to assist with this
th
will then break for the NASL/CLSA conference in March and endeavor. Potential locations for base stations need to be
return to chapter meetings on April 12 and May 10 . Please secured, as well as the need for periodic maintenance should
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be on the lookout for announcements on days, times, and a base station incur a technical glitch. Please reach out to any
locations of chapter meetings. We plan to have a roundtable Lahontan Chapter representative if you can help lend a hand!
discussion on issues affecting surveyors in the Northern
Nevada area as well as a couple of authors and historians
presenting on local Nevada topics.

Notice

U.S Survey Foot
As of December 31, 2021 NOAA (of which oversees the
National Geodetic Survey) and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology officially retired the U.S. Survey
Foot and have replaced it with the International Foot unit
of measurement. The international foot will specifically be
used in the update to the National Spatial Reference System
(NSRS). The NGS originally expected this datum to be ready and
available by 2022, but that deadline has now passed with an
unconfirmed future deployment date sometime in 2024-2025.

30 The Nevada Traverse Vol.50, No.1, 2023