Guides, industry commentary and technical articles from the Angell Surveys team — covering UAV survey, LiDAR, inspection, BIM and the regulations that govern them.
How a GNSS position in latitude and longitude becomes an Ordnance Survey National Grid coordinate — datums, ellipsoids, the Helmert transformation, OSTN15 and the Transverse Mercator projection, set out in full.
Surveying is the oldest applied mathematics there is. The geometry that measures a field in Suffolk is the geometry that measures one in Shaanxi — and that universality is what lets a global profession speak with one voice.
Tanks, vessels, shafts, sewers, ducts and voids are the most dangerous places a surveyor can go. Collision-tolerant UAVs let you inspect them without anyone going in. This guide explains how Elios-class drones work, when to use the Elios 2 versus the Elios 3, and what they deliver.
Linear infrastructure — rail, highway, pipeline, river catchment — is the survey geometry a fixed-wing VTOL was built for. This guide explains how corridor mapping with the Wingtra Ray works, how ground control is spaced along a corridor, and why the platform beats both multirotor and crewed aircraft for long, narrow sites.
A Development Consent Order survey is not just a bigger topographic survey. It is a single dataset that has to satisfy the Environmental Impact Assessment, Flood Risk Assessment, drainage strategy, Biodiversity Net Gain baseline and highways agreement simultaneously. This guide walks through the UAV workflow that delivers it.
The choice between a fixed-wing VTOL and a multirotor UAV is rarely about which flies better — it is about coverage rate, mobilisation, and cost per hectare at the scale of your site. This guide breaks down the economics of each and the crossover point where one decisively beats the other.
Capturing a defect in a 3D survey is the start, not the end. The value is in tracking it through its lifecycle — assessment, prioritisation, remediation, verification — and sharing it with every stakeholder without specialist software. This guide explains how a cloud-hosted Nira model does that.
A UAV survey on a nuclear-licensed site is a survey wrapped in a security, safety and access regime unlike any other sector. The flying is the easy part. This guide explains what makes nuclear survey work different and how the workflow is built around the constraints.
A drone captures position in WGS84 — but UK engineering deliverables are required on OSGB36 / Newlyn ODN. Getting from one to the other correctly, through OSTN15 and OSGM15, is what separates an engineering-grade survey from a pretty map. This guide explains the workflow.
Satellite positioning is the backbone of modern survey — until you go indoors, underground, under a bridge, into an urban canyon or beneath dense canopy. This guide explains where GNSS fails, why, and the survey methods that keep delivering accuracy when the sky disappears.
Reservoir surveys put two demands on a capture method that photogrammetry alone cannot meet: bare-earth levels under dense embankment vegetation, and consistent capture across large water-bounded sites. This guide explains why UAV LiDAR is the tool of choice and how the workflow is built.
Any UAV survey can quote an accuracy figure. The question that separates a survey you can build from one you can't is whether that figure was measured against independent check points or simply asserted. This guide sets out the QA/QC methodology that produces a defensible, RICS-referenced accuracy statement.