Get Survey Ready: How to Eliminate Field Delays Before You Deploy — Virtual Brew 2/19/26

Poor preparation leads to costly field delays. Before you deploy, take time to ensure your survey setup is fully operational—saving valuable time and avoiding last-minute field fixes.

Join Lon Duke, Field Data Solutions Specialist at American Innovations, as he shares expert insights on synchronizing hardware and software for peak performance.

In this session, Lon covers:

• ECDA Preassessment & FDC Setup: Master best practices for configuring parameters before you leave the office.
• Hardware Preparation: Learn how to inspect, stage, and get your equipment ready for the season.
• Advanced Configuration: Explore critical interruption settings and waveform setup.

Don’t miss this opportunity to streamline your workflow and ensure data integrity from day one.

And be sure to register for future Virtual Brews!

Transcript

Introduction

Ed Kruft
Good morning, everybody. Could somebody write in the chat and give me a big thumbs up that you can hear us and see — most importantly, Lon, not me? Awesome, thank you, Jesse. Thank you, Cassandra. My name is Ed Kruft, it’s very nice to be with you here today. I’m going to do a small introduction and then hand it over to Lon Duke, who’s the gentleman in the black shirt — you may not recognize him, since he’s usually wearing a cowboy hat.

Ed Kruft
Welcome, everybody — really happy for you all to be here for our February Virtual Brew. I just have a couple of quick slides, then I’ll hand it over to Lon, who has the technical content. Many of you have probably seen this version of the presentation before — we get positive feedback on it all the time, and we want to keep making it available.

Announcements: AMPP Nationals & Free Training

The biggest thing coming up is the AMPP nationals meeting in Houston, March 16th to 19th. The main thing we want you to know is that, as we’ve done the last few years, we’re offering free training on the Monday of that week. It’s at the Embassy Suites, which is almost across the street from the George R. Brown Convention Center, right by the big Hilton hotel. If you’d like to join us, you can scan the QR code on our website, or go to our webinar events page and sign up there. We’d love to have you there — it’s always good to keep doing continuous training.

Announcements: AI World

The other thing we wanted to highlight is AI World — we have new dates, November 1st through 5th, and a new venue. It’s going to be closer to downtown. You’ll recall we’ve been at the AT&T Conference Center on the UT campus for a while — that’s around 15th or 16th Street. The Omni is closer to 7th, so it’s right in the heart of downtown. A few of us toured the venue and are really excited — we think it’s going to work well, keep people close together, and give us some fun events nearby. There’s good parking for big trucks too, which was one of our requirements for the venue selection. I hope many of you, if not all of you, are able to make it.

Product Update: PCS 2.6 and FDC 2.3

From a product standpoint, two exciting releases: PCS 2.6 and FDC 2.3. If you joined us at AI World last year, you heard us talk about at least one PCS release per year being closely tied to FDC — we’re putting features into PCS that the latest version of FDC will benefit from, and vice versa. Those two are so closely coupled that we try to put the releases close to each other, so you can enjoy the new features at the same time.

We released PCS a couple of weeks ago and found a small issue — one of our longtime customers was able to alert us right away, and the fix is now available on the website. I’ll drop the link in the chat.

Three of the main features that combine elements of both products: we’ve always had the ability to capture waveforms, but we’ve made it much more seamless to capture and store those waveforms with your inspections, all the way back to PCS. We’ve also made it much easier to see waveforms in real time without jumping around within the app. And we’ve added new capabilities in both PCS and FDC to manage tank compliance. There’s a whole bunch of other features — scan the QR code for details.

The purpose of this session is really to give Lon the opportunity to share his experience getting ready for survey season, and to get your feedback. We do this presentation pretty regularly, and Lon is always making tweaks to improve it — if there’s anything you wish he’d covered, throw that in the chat or send us an email. With that, I’ll introduce Lon, and I’ll send you the link about PCS downloads in just a second.

Introduction to CI Survey Preassessment

Lon Duke
Thanks, Ed. Today we’re going to be talking about close interval surveys — preassessment and setup for any of your ECDA surveys. Here’s what we’re going to cover: survey considerations, then we’ll go over some survey equipment preparation, some hardware, some software. Hopefully we’ll cover any issues you may run into and get them taken care of before you get out in the field.

Preassessment: Pipe Data

First is your ECDA preassessment — things you want to know before you go out and start running your CI survey. Pipe data: what’s the coating? Do you have old coal tar, do you have FBE, do you have a mixture? If you’ve done a survey across old coal tar that’s been repaired with new FBE, you’ll see a change in those on/off readings. What’s the size of it, what’s the age of it?
Preassessment: Soil and Right-of-Way Conditions

Other things to consider are soil conditions and right-of-way conditions. Is that right-of-way cleared? You may have to plan on going through urban areas. What’s the soil resistivity of that area — that can vary drastically — and what’s the depth of cover of that particular pipe?

Preassessment: CP System and Operational Data

Another thing to know up front is your CP system — is it galvanic, or impressed, or a mixture of the two, which can cause issues? How many rectifiers do you have, where are those rectifiers, where are the ground beds? Things like that are good to know up front.

Operational data — any construction history, any history you can get on that line, is really good to know. Maybe you have new construction, or a repair in a certain area. If you have historical records, you may already know you could see issues in a certain area, which is good to know up front.

FDC Survey Setup Planning

As far as field data collector, before you get there: how are you going to run your survey — flag or fixed increment? If you’re running fixed increment, what’s the increment — two and a half or five feet? The Mega Rule now states no more than five-foot increments.

What type of survey is this — is it going to be an on survey, are you doing a native or a depolarized, or is it going to be an interrupted survey? Are you doing an AC or a DC CI survey? You can do either with FDC, but once you start one, you can’t switch — you’ll have to start a new survey to change.

Do you need sub-meter GPS? You’ll want to know that up front — you’ll need the Geode, which connects with FDC to give you that sub-meter GPS accuracy. What type of notes are going to be common in this survey — pipe exposures, pigs, depth of cover, things like that.

Survey Equipment Checklist

As far as your survey equipment goes, double-check everything before you get out in the field — all of your field computers, your Geode, everything needs to be charged. Your DVM will need to be charged if it’s the 2130.

Calibration — is it calibrated, do you have the calibration certificate? All of your wires and cabling — test them, check continuity, make sure everything works before you get out there and set up. Have any spare cables — spares are always good. Make sure you have the latest software — we’re constantly making improvements, whether that’s bug fixes or new features and enhancements.
Reference Cells and Strain Relief

Reference cells — it’s important to make sure that reference cell is clean, and that you have the correct type. Your copper sulfate — is it clean, is it charged? You want to make sure that copper rod is nice and shiny before you start, and that you’ve got good saturation with your copper sulfate crystals and distilled water — when you shake it up, you should still have some crystals falling to the bottom.

Another good thing to consider is the strain relief that comes with the DVM holder on the back of the Mesa 3 or other tablets — this is really good for keeping strain off the DVM itself, so make sure you wrap the cable through it so it’s not pulling on those DVM cables all the time.

Calibration

We offer calibrations — you get a certificate for it, good for a year, and we don’t just verify, we actually do a true calibration. It runs through a whole array of voltages, and if anything is out of spec, we adjust it so it’s back in spec.

Interruption Considerations

Things to consider for interruption: what’s your on/off cycle — does the cycle begin with on or off? About 85% of people out there are starting in the off. What’s your relay type — solid state versus mercury? If you’re running a fast cycle, mercury isn’t going to keep up — three-on, one-off is about the fastest you’d want with mercury. Solid state will run sub-second cycles.

Are the relays normally open versus normally closed? Foreign lines out there — you’ve got to know what foreign lines are out there, what’s bonded, what will be affecting you, because you’ll need to interrupt anything you’re bonded to or that affects you. It’s good to get with the other operators out there and make sure everyone’s running on the same on/off cycle. Is there any AC mitigation out there that causes issues? We’ll look at that in a second.

Verifying Interruption Sync

The first thing you’ll want to do is verify that you’ve got interruption and that you’re getting a true on and a true polarized potential — a true instant-off. So go to the waveform in the DVM, hook up, and make sure that dotted line crosses the on and off where you want it — you may have to adjust it. Down at the bottom, you’ll see your on and off readings.

You also have your “cycle begins with” setting — on or off. One of the common things is, if “cycle begins with” isn’t correct, you’ll see a shift of everything over by one second right away. Generally that means your “cycle begins with” setting in FDC doesn’t match what your interrupter is doing. It doesn’t matter what it’s set to on the interrupter, as long as we have it set the same way. So if we set it to match what our interrupter is doing, now we’re lined up, synced, and getting good on/off readings.

Reading Waveforms: Common Issues

Some things to consider when you’re looking at your waveforms out there: if you have AC mitigation, you have PCRs out there — this is pretty common, you’ll see that capacitive discharge and recharge. It’s next to impossible to get a true instant-off reading off of that, and if there’s any zinc ribbon added to that AC mitigation, it just exacerbates the issue — you get that sawtooth pattern on there.

Interruptors out of sync — up in the upper right, there’s an interrupter probably starting in the wrong part of the cycle. You need to find that, because it’s affecting your on reading — and if that interrupter is coming back on when all your others are going off, your offs are going to be elevated as well, so you’re not going to get good readings.

The last one — if you see something like this, it’s a DC transit system. You’re getting a lot of noise bleeding onto your line and picking all of that up.

Q&A: High-Low Mode

[Moderator]
Lon, we do have a question online — it says, would you ever use high-low?

Lon Duke
High-low is an interesting one — it’s kind of a carryover from back in the day. I don’t know if anybody remembers surveying 20 years ago or more, when GPS could be hard to get and hard to lock into and keep. So it would fall back to high-low mode. High-low mode is a blind mode — it takes your full cycle, so if you’re three-on, one-off, it takes 4 seconds of readings and throws out so many highs and so many lows, and then there’s your on and your off. You’re getting rid of things like anodic spikes to get your true reading.

Now, the caveat is that it’s blind — it’s always going to assume the more negative readings are your on readings, and the more positive are your offs. That may not be the case, so if you’ve got somewhere it’s inverted, it’ll mask that. Generally, GPS Sync is what’s used most, along with possibly GPS Real Time, which I’ll show you here in a bit.

Fixed Increment Mode: Anchoring the Survey Wire

In fixed increment mode — in this case I have 2.5 feet for my increment — something to be aware of: say I’ve got 1,000 feet of pipe with a bend, either going up a hill or bending left or right, about 135 degrees. Once I get up to that bend, if I don’t anchor that survey wire down, I’m not going to get 1,000 feet — I’m going to get about 924 feet. So be aware, if you’re using fixed increment, tie it around some grass or whatever — it doesn’t take much to get it tied down, so you get your true stationing and don’t come up short.

Flag Mode

Flag mode is another option. In the properties, you’ll set a flag distance — in this case, 100 feet. If I’m running flag mode, I’ll go out ahead of time and set flags, measuring and placing them every 100 feet.

As I survey, every time I come across a flag, I’ll put a flag in my survey. There are a couple ways to do it — you can set it to detect a double-click on your button, so if you click twice within half a second, it’ll automatically put a flag in there. If I start at zero and hit my first flag, it sets that 0 to 100 feet, and increments my stationing based on how many reads I have — 20 reads in that 100 feet increments to five-foot readings; 40 reads in that 100 feet rubber-bands to 2.5-foot increments.

The thing with this is that every time you hit a flag, you’re resetting your distance, and that distance is correct because it’s already been measured out there — so every one of your stationings ends up pretty much spot on.

GPS Real Time vs. GPS Sync

Something else we get a lot of questions on is GPS Real Time. It’s generally used for longer cycles. With GPS Sync, you get an on/off pair — every on/off pair comes at one per cycle. So if I’m running a 4- or 5-second total cycle — say, four-on, one-off — I’ll get a new on/off pair every 5 seconds, so I can walk a decent distance in 5 seconds. That means you get duplicate reads until the next on/off pair comes along, for longer cycles.

Some people prefer to use GPS Real Time instead. What GPS Real Time does is set up a window where you’re not going to record a reading — you don’t want to record a reading during any of the transitions, because in GPS Real Time, every time you trigger a read, it gives you a live reading of wherever it is, in the on or the off. So you’re not getting an on/off pair, you’re getting whatever reading is current at that time.

In GPS Real Time, you set up an on delay and an off delay, and then a GPS Real Time setup — the setup is anything before a transition, the delay is anything after a transition. That creates windows where we will not take a read. If a reading happens in that window, it just gives me my last good reading from the on, or the last good reading from the off.

We do get calls on this setup — people make these windows way too tight, to where you only have maybe 50 milliseconds to get an off, so you’re not getting many of your offs. Again, this is generally for longer cycles. What happens is it records the on, then the off, the off, then the on, the on, the on, the off, the off, as you go along — every time it triggers a read, it puts either the on or the off. You’re not getting a pair, it’s a true reading at that point.

Q&A: Why Use GPS Real Time

[Attendee]
Lon, on that previous slide — why would someone want to use that? I’m just curious.

Lon Duke
Well, if you have a four-on-one-off, or even an eight-second-on, two-second-off — some people want longer cycles for different reasons. I’m only going to get another reading every 5 or 10 seconds, so I could have 5 or 10 readings with the same on/off pair before it switches to the new cycle. This allows you to get that on and that off wherever you are, so you’re not having to wait for that new on/off pair. If you have that on/off pair for 5 or 10 seconds’ worth, you’re going to see that in the survey — it’ll be the same reading, and then you’ll get a stair step, still the same reading.

So anything probably longer than three-on-one-off — fast cycles are good for GPS Real Time or GPS Sync. Three-on-one-off is fine, you’re going to get one every 4 seconds. Once you start getting into longer cycles, you may want to consider GPS Real Time.

Closing

Ed Kruft
Thank you, Lon, I appreciate it — and thank you all for the comments and questions. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at AMPP in Houston. We’re trying to highlight something on our website that we’ve had for years and used to actively promote, with a lot more customer engagement — our ideas portal. If you go to our website, slash ideas, it allows you to put in product ideas or feature ideas, and if you see something you like from someone else, you can vote on it. It’s really helpful — we get feedback from all of our customers throughout the year, very concentrated at AI World, and a lot of great feedback at all the AMPP events we do, but we don’t want to limit that to just when we’re in person, so we want to bring those ideas in electronically too.

Thank you for attending, thank you for presenting, Lon — hope everybody has a great Thursday and rest of their week. Thank you very much.