“We have purchased most of our survey and GPS equipment from Leica…and in 2008 bought our first Leica airborne sensor,” said Azadeh Koohzare, McElhanney’s Project Manager. “we like the way these user-friendly systems work and the support we get from Leica.”
McElhanney is an engineering, mapping, surveying and environmental services company based in Canada with a global reach. From its offices in Canada and Indonesia, the company is heavily involved in mining and exploration, energy transmission, and oil & gas projects worldwide. McElhanney flies its LiDAR scanners and digital cameras to projects across Canada, Southeast Asia, South America, Mexico and the United States.
The new Leica ALS70-HP LiDAR and RCD30 camera will be operated from the Vancouver headquarters, where McElhanney already maintains a Leica ALS50 LiDAR and the RCD105 camera. McElhanney Indonesia office in Jakarta currently operates a Leica ALS60 laser scanner and RCD30 camera. Depending on the needs of specific projects, McElhanney often deploys a LiDAR and digital camera together on one aircraft for simultaneous collection of elevation and imagery.
“We selected the HP model of the ALS70 because we are seeing a lot of demand for higher point density and feature extraction with LiDAR,” said Koohzare. “The ALS70-HP provides a high pulse rate that gives us a higher point density in one flight, which saves time and money.”
Koohzare explained the higher point density LiDAR collections have become common for projects involving detailed engineering design work and extraction of features, such as electric transmission lines and towers.
“The ALS70-HP allows users to fly higher and faster without sacrificing point density,” said Jean Gardiner, General Manager of the Leica Geospatial Solutions.
The Leica ALS70 is an affordable airborne laser scanner with a 500 kHz pulse rate capability designed specifically for high-density point collection in diverse environments to serve many type of elevation mapping projects. The Leica ALS70-HP version purchased was developed for general purpose mapping over a wide variety of terrain conditions at different flying altitudes. The ALS70 utilizes full waveform pulses, which allow for better analysis of ground cover and extraction of more meaningful information. This LiDAR sensor offers three user-selected scan patterns that provide the flexibility to meet the specific mapping requirements of different projects.
“The entire family of Leica ALS scanners features plug-and-play compatibility with our medium-format digital camera solutions, such as the RCD30,” said Gardiner.
Introduced by Leica as a digital follow-on to its highly successful RC30 film cameras, the RCD30 is a medium-format digital imaging system developed for a variety of photogrammetric and remote sensing applications. The 60 MP single-camera-head design delivers co-registered, multispectral imagery in the Red, Green, Blue and Near IR portions of the spectrum. The sleek modular design allows the camera to fit easily in aircraft previously outfitted with film cameras, and the RCD30 integrates with many LiDAR sensors, including the Leica ALS series.
