Announcement: Bad Elf Supports High Accuracy Location in Esri Collector

We have all heard that phrase, “Location, location, location.”

But, what does this mean for the world of GIS? Obtaining location accuracy when collecting data delivers incredible value. The smart devices we carry daily in our pockets or the tablets we use for education and entertainment can only reliably deliver an accuracy of about five meters. For some, that is good enough. For others, it has to be better.

Consider standing on a point and looking five meters in any direction. If you are looking for a park bench in the middle of nowhere, it will be easy to find.

However, what if that point you have in your GIS is within a meter? It’s a lot easier to find and locate many items in an area if you know your location is about as far away as you can stretch your arms.

Bad Elf has been working with the Collector team at Esri to provide reliable and highly accurate location services directly to the Collector mobile applications across various platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows). The Bad Elf GNSS Surveyor was designed and built to provide mapping grade accuracy of about one meter when used with the built-in SBAS + PPP hardware. The GNSS Surveyor accessory, combined with Esri Collector, delivers an affordable solution for GIS data collection and mapping with the benefit of higher accuracy.

With the new high performance features built directly into the Esri Collector app, Bad Elf now supplies additional accuracy information right to the app. The screenshot below reinforces the fact that location supplied by the internal GPS is only OK.

Within the most recent beta Esri Collector app, there is a facility to configure external GPS receivers to supply higher accuracy location information. Bad Elf has fully integrated with this facility.

The result of this collaboration offers simplified workflow in addition to definitive location accuracy. With a simple set of configuration steps, Bad Elf receivers provide detailed location data directly to the Esri Collector app.

Field collection professionals now enjoy more robust information. The addition of detailed location information provides accurate, efficient, and economical workflows.

High accuracy location was once difficult to attain, cumbersome, and costly. Bad Elf brings affordability and accuracy to the next generation of mobile data collection. If your question is “How accurate is my location information when I collect field data?” Bad Elf, combined with Esri Collector, is the solution.

Bad Elf is attending the Esri User Conference this week in San Diego, June 28-30. Please stop by and visit us in the UC Expo, Booth 533.