I finally compared ground penetrating radar to old fashioned test pits on a site last month

We were surveying a 1700s farmstead in upstate New York and had a week to locate the foundation. The GPR gave us these fuzzy blobs that could have been anything, so I decided to dig two test pits where we thought the main house was. First pit hit stone rubble at 18 inches, second one uncovered a hearth base. The radar showed a ghost shape but the shovel told the real story. Has anyone else found that the older methods still beat the tech stuff for small sites?

2 comments

2 Comments

alexc931d agoMost Upvoted

My buddy runs a crew in Pennsylvania and they tried GPR on a similar 1700s site a few years back. The radar kept lighting up over a bunch of old drainage pipes they didn't know about, so they dug a test pit by hand and nailed the house foundation in one afternoon. He still jokes that a shovel and a sharp eye beat a $20,000 machine any day.

jessica_hall491d ago

Doesn't that kind of sum up how things work now? We've got all these gadgets but sometimes the old way just gets it done faster. I swear, half the time people rely on tech when common sense would work just as good. My dad fixes his own car and he still uses a timing light from the 70s over the computer scanner half the time. Maybe the trick is knowing when to use what, not just using the fanciest tool.