About SnakeGrid

The SnakeGrid family of products provide a comprehensive solution to a significant  problem in engineering surveying – the design of a coordinate system with minimal scale  factor and height distortion even when projects extend for many hundreds of kilometres.

When working on projects that extend for a few kilometres, engineers and surveyors are  accustomed to the concept of a local site grid that effectively makes a flat Earth  assumption.

As projects grow beyond a few kilometres, however, it becomes necessary to introduce a  projected coordinate system – and then all those working on the site have the problem of  making scale factor corrections. If there is a significant height range across the project  then there is the added problem of making reductions to sea level or any other standard  reference height.

The SnakeGrid solution provides a coordinate grid system that maintains a unity scale  factor along a trend line that follows the project in plan and height.

In this way, projects such as railways, highways and pipelines that extend for hundreds of  kilometres can have a single seamless grid with a scale factor distortion less than a few  parts per million along the whole project and for several kilometres on either side.

The SnakeGrid family of products a design service to produce the SnakeGrids, software  to transform between coordinate system and mapping of raster images and also provides  the core SnakeGrid functionality as a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) for integration into  third party software and instrumentation