Field Notes Are Your Saving Grace

Before you can even start a drawing, Rami Tamimi says, you have to look at the field notes. "The field notes are a guide to what happened in the field." They're also the piece of documentation that protects a deliverable if anything is ever questioned. (watch at 13:07)

What a good set of field notes actually contains

A complete field notes record, according to Tamimi, includes: the points used, their coordinates, the instrumentation and type of receiver, antenna heights during data collection, any correction sources used (and which mount point, if applicable), the coordinates of the base location, checkpoint data, weather conditions, and who was on the crew.

Some of these matter more than people expect. Weather is a real example: "If it's a really, really hot day, actually the mirrors inside the total station can refract, and that can create some source of error for you." If a dataset looks off later and there's no obvious cause, the field notes — including something as simple as the temperature that day — can be the thing that explains it. "Look at the field notes. Oh my God, it's 35°C. That could impact your data set."

Documenting who was on the crew matters for the same reason: when there's an issue with the data later, you need to be able to go back to the people who collected it and ask what happened.

Field notes are your saving grace

Tamimi doesn't understate how much this matters: "Field notes are your saving grace. When you go to court, the field notes will set you free." They're the evidence of what actually happened in the field, and they're often the only record that exists once the crew has moved on to the next job.

He also recommends taking far more photos than seems necessary — even photos the client will never see. "Your office staff will see them and they'll be able to make decisions based off of" them, whether that's confirming orientation or catching something that was done incorrectly. Using the numbers already printed on physical targets, and staying consistent with how you label each point, keeps the whole dataset easier to reference later. Even a random elevation shot with no physical feature should be photographed and logged.

Before you leave the site

Tamimi's pre-departure checklist is short but catches the mistakes that are hardest to fix after the fact: (watch at 15:37)

• Confirm every control point was actually checked and measured — twice, if two people are working, since it's easy for one person to assume the other already shot a point.

• Confirm your closing shot back to the starting point, to catch any misclosure in a total station loop.

• Confirm rod heights and antenna heights were written down accurately. A height logged as 2.0 meters when it was actually 1.8 meters introduces a systematic error you won't catch until you're deep into analysis and wondering why 40 shots are off.

• Write the correction source and mount point clearly, in a way someone unfamiliar with the project could understand — because the person reading it back might not be you, and might not even be reading it for another ten years.

"Someone else will read this, and it might not be someone you know right now," Tamimi said. "They should be able to retrace your work."

The takeaway

Field notes aren't paperwork overhead — they're the layer that makes a dataset defensible, explainable, and reproducible years after the crew has left the site. At Remote Robotic, every flight and ground control session is logged with this level of detail, so when a client or a regulator asks how a number was derived, the answer is in the record, not in someone's memory.

Survey & mapping solutions · DJI drones for survey & mapping in Canada