![]() Okay, the surveyors are covered for field calculations, but what about the students? After replacing them, again leave the calculator off for about five to 10 minutes to let the power level out. Replace them one at a time, never taking them all (in this case both) out at once. Wait about five to 10 minutes before you try to change batteries and have the new batteries ready. When you get a low-battery warning, do not try for "one more answer" turn it off. The current calculator is the HP50g, 15 times faster than the 48, very affordable, and with reasonably priced software available.Ī Tip on Changing Batteries in All Calculators If the calculator can't be replaced, you're stuck with software that, in some cases, cost over $2,000 and won't work in anything else. We've arrived at a point where surveyors are paying whatever it takes to buy used HP48s on eBay. Calculators got better and cheaper the software for surveyors was extremely expensive, in several price ranges (none of them low). Then came the HP48 and the advent of third-party software, in several updated versions, ending with the HP48GX (graphic expandable). Hewlett-Packard had very low-cost application pacs for the 65, 67, and 41, one of them being a Surveying Pac, which locked HP in as the surveyor's calculator of choice. Students could afford them too, since the prices came down as the functionality went up. It lasted 14 years of production, and those who still have working 41s won't give them up. The 41 kept evolving, with the final HP41CX (expected by HP to have a life of about three years). We went through the HP45, HP65, HP67/97 (these latter two had built-in card readers, allowing the user to program them), and finally the HP41. In the ensuing years surveyors have looked to Hewlett-Packard for the latest technology in programmable calculators to work with. Notably, the HP35 was handy for surveyors, but students couldn't afford it. Instead, we carried little notebooks of keystrokes to follow for each type of calculation. The book we used to look up tangents (Peters) was left in the office. The books of sines and cosines to eight decimal places and nearest second sat in the back of the truck. It also had a hard-to-read LED display, but we shaded it in the sun and didn't care. ![]() The 'big deal' to surveyors was that the HP35 included the trig functions and storage registers. Prior to 1972, surveyors relied on books of tables, mechanical calculators, slide rules, and hand calculations to calculate anything they needed to know. ![]()
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