California Resort Mecca Picks Magellan for Expanded GIS duties
Following a head-to-head competition, Palm
Desert chooses MobileMapper CE
Palm Desert, California
For the city of Palm Desert, Calif., the success of its eight-year-old
GIS program has been an ongoing source of municipal pride.
That’s why, when the city recently voted to expand the program to
include a wider variety of public works, traffic, recreational and
other municipal assets, it also decided to upgrade its aging,
outdated GPS data collectors with newer, more accurate, lighter-
weight equipment.
The clear choice for meeting the program’s growing demands: the
Magellan MobileMapper CE.
“To select the right equipment for the job, we compared four well-known and competing handheld GPS
receivers for accuracy, cost and accessibility to technical support,” said John Urkov, GIS technician. “Two
competitors were pretty much eliminated at the outset: one we considered too costly and the other didn’t
run ESRI’s ArcPad software. The remaining two candidates were put through an extensive head-to-head,
two-month field competition.”
The Winner for Accuracy
To help measure the accuracy of the two units, the GIS department was fortunate to have right in its own
parking lot a city benchmark whose position had recently been surveyed to within one centimeter. Virtually
every work day for approximately two months, under a variety of weather and satellite conditions, the two
competing handheld units were compared for accuracy and reliability. The daily comparisons yielded clear
results. “The MobileMapper CE outperformed its lone competitor more than 80 percent of the time,” Urkov
said. “Both pre-processed and post-processed, MobileMapper data was more defined and accurate
compared to the competing handheld, which produced points significantly more scattered and less accurate.”
The accuracy of the two units was also compared by walking and logging GPS polyline data for city features.
“We would walk and collect GPS data with each unit simultaneously and compare the lines using all our
georectified aerial photos and other GIS data which we knew was accurate. The Magellan MobileMapper
lines fell right where they should be while the competing unit – when it didn’t lose fix and lock up –
produced lines that were jagged and all over the place.”
The Winner for Cost and Support
Superior accuracy alone would have been reason enough to select the Magellan MobileMapper CE. But city
officials were in for a pleasant surprise; it was also the low- cost solution of all the receivers and about half
the cost of the unit it competed against and beat on accuracy.
We were delighted to find
the Magellan had superior
accuracy since it had the
lowest price by half,
John Urkov,
GIS technician
”
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Case Study:
Palm Desert Manages Municipal
Assets with MobileMapper
™
CE
