Since that is the one thing everyone wants to know when you get a new job, I will provide an short explanations of what I do as a Field Systems Operator.

To start with, the company I work for collects information about roadways for state departments of transportation.  The company has vehicles outfitted with specialized equipment involving lasers and digital cameras which can document the conditions of pavement, signage, vertical and horizontal clearances.  The states use this information to prioritize maintenance, provide information to the transportation industry (aka trucking) and verify which segments of roadway do or do not meets various federal and state standards.

I am partnered with another FSO and we trade off driving the customized 15-passenger van and operating the equipment inside.  The driving is pretty straightforward.  Keep the van in the middle of the lane, follow the driving directions of the operator and don’t exceed the maximum speed for the equipment to function.  That’s pretty much it.  Oh, and don’t run into anything.  That’s important too.

Being the operator means navigating the vehicle, engaging and disengaging the equipment at the start and end of a route, and making adjustments to the cameras to compensate for changes in lighting conditions.  There is a list of routes that need to be collected and it’s up to the operator to plan the day’s travel so we can hit up as many of them as efficiently as we can.  You need to be able to adjust your plan on the fly in case conditions in the traffic or the weather change.  For a spatial thinker like me, it is an engaging daily exercise.

Much of the job involves documenting as much of what your doing as possible, so if something goes wrong, they can know if it was the operator, the equipment or the list of routes provided by the DOT and then the project managers can make a call about possibly redoing a route.

That’s the core of what I do.  There is some other minutia I could mention, but it will only make this wordier than it is.  In the future I might go into some more detail about some of these laser-based devices because they are pretty cool.  Especially the LIDAR.  I’m not working with that on this Illinois project, but that’s some awesome technology right there.  It basically renders the environment in 3D in real time.

I hope that answers some of the basic questions you might have.

-reporting from Moline, Illinois