Tried ground penetrating radar over traditional digging on a site near my shop last fall and the difference was huge

We had this old farmstead lot behind my electrical shop in Rochester and I volunteered to help with the survey. The team did one section with standard test pits and another with GPR, and the radar picked up three buried foundations in about 2 hours that we would have missed for days. Has anyone else seen a big gap between old school methods and newer tech on a dig?

2 comments

2 Comments

torres.elizabeth21d ago

Got a similar setup last year on a late 1800s homestead site near me, GPR found an old well and a root cellar in less than an afternoon. Took the traditional crew almost a week with probes and test pits to map out just half that area. Really made me a believer in letting the tech do the heavy lifting first.

grace_hunt8421d ago

Wait, did you guys run into issues with the GPR not penetrating certain soil types? I helped out on a site near Newark last fall and the radar just died on some clay patches, but once we hit the sandy loam it was like magic. We found a whole line of stone wall footings in less than 45 minutes that the probe crew had been poking around for for two days with nothing to show for it. The tech guys were practically giddy, lol. I'm honestly with you on letting the machine do the boring work first, it saves so much back pain and wasted energy. The only thing I'd say is you still gotta have someone who knows what they're looking at on the screen because the false positives can get wild if you're not careful.