Current status of EDM calibration procedures in NSW

In Australia, the legal basis for a national system of units and standards of measurement of physical quantities is provided by the National Measurement Act 1960. Under this Act, the Surveyor General of New South Wales is a verifying authority for reference standards of length measurements and responsible for ensuring that surveyors use verified measuring equipment. To this end, the Surveying and Spatial Information Regulation 2012 requires surveyors to verify their Electronic Distance Measurement (EDM) equipment in relation to an Australian standard of measurement of length at least once a year. In order to assist the profession in meeting this requirement, Land and Property Information (LPI) provides and maintains several EDM baselines across the state. LPI is currently in the process of improving this infrastructure by upgrading existing baselines and building new baselines for the calibration of EDM instruments. This paper presents the current status of EDM baseline infrastructure in NSW and outlines the data processing performed by LPI in regards to EDM calibrations. The EDMCAL program currently employed by LPI is described and compared to a popular spreadsheet calculation generated by the University of New South Wales. It is shown that both of these software tools generate comparable results. Finally, LPI’s new online EDM baseline booking system is introduced. This online system should now be used by surveyors to book access to all EDM baselines in NSW in order to allow efficient and effective use of existing and future baseline infrastructure.