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Thanks for your high quality response to my mediocre posting. I think our current maps are like a patchwork quilt made up of patches of high precision / high accuracy data sewn to high accuracy / low precision basemaps. Surveyors will use a ‘Horizontal/Vertical Datum of the day’ to keep things relevant to maps but in reality, their scope of work ends at xy = 5000,5000 and that’s it (relative coordinates). Most people I’ve met aren’t keeping up with NOAA. But nothing will come close to the bearings and distances (error of closure) to what a totalstation can generate in their arsenal. In the end, a Civil Engineer or GIS tech will be creating that mosaic out of the surveyor data and store it in a retrievable format for county records. The data is stored but there’s still a never reconcilable difference between survey data and mapping data.

Thus TotalStations with GNSS seem oxymoronic to me just as a GPS with a laser range finder is. There is a huge opportunity (for those interested) to build a surveyor-grade worldmap.