2007 marked the thirteenth consecutive annual Intergeo. The venue for this major conference and trade-fair for geodesy, geoinformation and land management, held this year from 24th to 28th September, shifts from year to year, always within the boundaries of Germany. This time the train stopped at Leipzig. The event is organised by HINTE GmbH in association with the German Association of Surveying (DVW), and this year took place in conjunction with the fifty-fifth German Cartographer’s Day. The event made clearer than ever that geo-data acquisition is a booming industry. All things considered, including current financial figures, vendors of data acquisition systems face very good times.
Lying at the intersection of the medieval "via regia" between Paris and Novgorad in the Urals and the "via regia" linking Norway with Rome, Leipzig was by the early sixteenth century already the biggest German trading centre for exchange of goods between western and eastern Europe. The privilege of being the only town within a radius of 115km with storage for commodities will certainly have helped it achieve this status. As the industrial revolution progressed, trading companies increasingly brought samples of their products to Leipzig rather than their whole stock, and by 1870 such traders numbered more than a hundred.
Double M
The logo of the Leipzig Fair, two stacked Ms, reflects this history; the double M stands for ‘Mustermesse’ or Sample Fair. And now, in the twenty-first century, 475 exhibitors brought to the show innumerable samples of their products and services, all about acquisition, processing and use of geo-information. The proportion of non-German companies was almost 30% and the nearly 150 foreign companies came from 27 countries. More than 16,500 people visited the fair. In addition to the German language there were English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and other Slavic voices in the air. The second day was the busiest on the exhibition floor.
Booming Geomatics
Geo-information is a booming market and manufacturers are flocking from a plethora of directions for a bite at the cake. One successful example represented at Intergeo was Magellan. Focusing mainly on the consumer market, the company also wants to serve the survey one, and not particularly the high-end of it. The company is looking at the surveyor who requires centimetre accuracy at an affordable price and for whom measuring a point in several minutes rather than seconds is not a decisive drawback. ProMark3 RTK can provide this in real time using Satellite Based Augmentation (SBAS). SBAS supports wide-area or regional augmentation through measurements taken at multiple ground stations. Correction messages are derived from these measurements and sent to one or more satellites for broadcast to the end-user to improve initial GPS measurements. SBAS Magellan’s embedded BLADE (Base Line Accurate Determination Engine) technology enables the provision of centimetre accuracy using single-frequency only, and this also implies considerably lower cost. ProMark3 operates in two modes, base and rover, and rover alone and is designed for easy use without extensive training.
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