Why Good Pole Data Starts at the Pole

How two-person, photo-based field crews collect faster, collect safer, and produce a record you can defend.

Field data collection matters more than any other step in the workflow. Everything downstream depends on it. Make ready engineering, pole loading analysis, permitting, the deliverable a utility actually accepts, the attachment record a joint use team relies on for years: all of it inherits the quality of what came back from the field. Clean field data means clean designs, clean submissions, and fewer of the conversations nobody wants to have. Bad (or indefensible) field data means rework, rollbacks, disputes, and rejected packages that push construction past the date you promised.

There is a lot of conversation in this industry right now about how to make field collection cheaper, faster, and further from the pole. Some of that conversation is worth having, and we will get to the scopes where collecting from a distance genuinely makes sense. But as of today, the foundation has not changed: for most distribution engineering and attachment work, the data you need still lives at the pole. The safest, fastest, most reliable way to capture it is to get a crew on site using Katapult Pro. 

For more information, check out how our field data collection workflow fits the rest of a project. Or, see the workflow in action here.

The Data That Only Exists at the Base of the Pole

Start with what a make ready or attachment package actually requires, because that is what determines how close you have to get.

You need attacher-level detail: who owns each line, what equipment is hung where, the tag and birthmark that identify the pole, the grounding, the down guys and anchors. You need accurate heights for every attachment in the communication and power space so the loading analysis means something. And you need midspan information, because your proposed adjustments on the pole will have an impact over critical crossings, too.

A fair amount of that data simply does not exist anywhere except at the structure. The birthmark stamped into the wood, the inspection medallion, the groundwire (or lack thereof) at the base: none of that reads from an aerial pass or a corridor scan. It reads when someone is standing close enough to photograph it. This is the part of the job people are describing when they talk about "hugging the pole," and for the data above, there is no shortcut around it. You can move the measurement and the engineering into the office, which is exactly what a good workflow does, but the capture happens where the asset is.

The question, then, is not whether to collect at the pole. It is how to do it so the trip is fast, safe, and produces something you can stand behind later. That is where the method earns its keep.

See how field data flows into the rest of the Katapult Method, from collection through deliverable, without re-entry or format conversion.

Why We Send Two People, Not One

The most common pushback on our approach is the headcount. A second person in the truck is a real cost, and any honest comparison has to account for it. So here is why we run two-person crews on purpose, and why the math works out in the customer's favor.

The crew splits into two defined roles. The Crew Lead handles height and context photos, verifies the pre-designed route on a mobile device, and marks each pole and midspan as done before moving on. The Crew Partner handles the close detail shots, the tag, birthmark, grounding, and the up and back angles, and holds the calibration stick flush against the base of the pole while the Lead captures the height image from a distance. Two people moving as one coordinated unit is what lets a crew clear poles quickly without skipping anything, because one person is never trying to frame a height shot and read a birthmark and track progress on a map all at once. When looking to capture every anchor and downguy, every bolted reference, and looking out for downed conductors, a buddy can really come in handy.

That coordination shows up in throughput. Our own field services team tracks working pace closely, and the benchmarks are not theoretical.

"If we are in the city, I think 50 poles an hour is a good number to shoot for. I schedule at least 150 to 200 poles in a city day."

-Seth Morris, Field Services Team Lead, Katapult Engineering

Spread the poles out into rural routes with brush and access challenges, and that drops to 20 to 25 poles an hour, with 125 to 150 scheduled for the day. Because each day also contains travel, breaks, and walking back to the vehicle, not every hour is spent actually collecting data.

Backyards run closer to the country pace, with adjusted expectations on midspans and access. The numbers move with the scope and the terrain, which is the point: a crew that knows its workflow can move fast where the work allows it. When you compare a two-person crew that clears 150 poles in a day against a single-person setup collecting far fewer, the second seat stops looking like doubled labor and starts looking like the reason your cost per pole and your cost per finished deliverable come down.

There is a second benefit that matters as much as speed, and it is one of the quieter reasons our model holds up. Because collection is a photo workflow rather than an engineering exercise in the field, a new crew member does not need years of design experience to be productive. New fielders reach roughly 85 percent of veteran production within a few weeks, which is what makes it realistic to scale a team up for a BEAD-driven surge instead of waiting months for people to ramp. We have written more about how we build and run field teams if you manage fielders yourself.

The Safety Case People Skip Past

Safety is usually argued as a reason to get crews away from the pole. It is worth walking through carefully, because the ground-based photo method exists in large part for safety reasons, and the details matter.

The old way of getting accurate heights meant climbing, or reaching a hot stick up into the energized space, or running a bucket truck. For high-volume attachment surveys, those methods put a person in a hazardous position at every single pole. Ground-based photo collection was designed to remove that category of exposure. The crew works from the ground. The calibration stick is held flush against the base of the pole, not raised into the power space, and the top section is lowered when there is any chance of contact with live wires. The stick is not rated for energized contact, and our crews treat it that way. Nobody is reaching toward the neutral to get a number.

And on the risks that actually injure fielders day to day, traffic and public interaction, a second set of eyes is a safety asset rather than a liability. One person can watch the road and the surroundings while the other concentrates on the capture. We plan field operations around those exposures with marked vehicles, high-visibility vests, and many other precautions, because a crew standing on a road shoulder is far more likely to be hit by a car than by anything coming off the pole.

In brush and heavy vegetation, the Katapult approach is a major asset. The collapsible stick can easily get under tree limbs, and with 17 feet of usable calibration markers, it’s extremely rare to come across a pole you can’t measure with precision, even in overgrown summer months. 

Defensible by Default: The Record the Photo Leaves Behind

Here is the part that pays off long after the crew has left the site. A calibrated field photo is not just a measurement. It is permanent, reviewable evidence of what was on that pole the day it was captured.

Every photo is time-stamped and tied to its location through the workflow, then uploaded to a shared cloud database. The measurement itself comes out of calibrating the image in the office against the height stick, which produces accuracy within about 3 inches at 50 feet, with relative heights between bolted attachments tighter still (+/- ¼”). When a utility questions a clearance during engineering review months later, you do not relitigate it from competing field notes. You pull up the photo, show exactly what was there, and the conversation is over. 

This is especially true for midspans, which are notoriously hard to defend after the fact. A perpendicular midspan shot captures the clearance and the conductors in a way a written measurement never can, and because it is dated and stored with everything else, it holds up when an attacher or a pole owner disputes what was actually spanning the road. The same record makes virtual rideouts possible: every party reviews the same photos from their own desk instead of scheduling a truck to roll back out so three people can stand under the pole and disagree in person. For a joint use team managing thousands of attachments, that shared, photo-backed record is the difference between a defensible program and a filing cabinet of assumptions. It is the backbone of how joint use management actually works when the volume gets real.

When a reviewer questions a midspan clearance, the answer should come from one place: the calibrated, time-stamped photo your crew already captured. That is the record Katapult Pro is built to produce, store, and share with every party who needs it, so a dispute gets resolved with evidence instead of a recollection.

Book a field data collection walkthrough | See how the Katapult Pro platform fits together

Why We Shoot With Cameras You Can Replace Anywhere

People are sometimes surprised that our crews carry a high-quality consumer camera rather than a single proprietary field device. That is a deliberate choice, and it comes down to two things: where the accuracy actually comes from, and what happens when something breaks at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Our measurements do not depend on the camera's GPS or on any survey-grade positioning built into the hardware. They come from calibrating the photo against the height stick in the office, and the photo-to-location association comes from time-stamped buckets the crew creates as they mark each pole done, not from coordinates baked into the image. That design is what frees us to use off-the-shelf cameras. In addition to a lens that produces high accuracy when combined with the Katapult Pro photogrammetry algorithm, approved cameras and lenses also need great zoom and a good sensor, so an engineer can zoom in later to read a conductor spec, identify an attachment type, and trace ownership across a span. Consumer mirrorless cameras do this well. 

The practical payoff is uptime. If a camera fails in the middle of a project, a crew can drive to the nearest electronics store, the kind of store within driving distance of most towns in the US, and have a replacement in hand the same afternoon. There is no waiting on a replacement unit to ship, no proprietary part to source, no days lost. The value of the system lives in the method and the software that turns photos into calibrated, connected data, not in the camera itself. Treating the camera as a commodity is what keeps a field program running when hardware inevitably has a bad day.

One Trip, Every Deliverable

The reason all of this is worth doing carefully is that a single, well-run collection trip should feed the entire project. That is the economic argument that the headcount conversation usually misses.

The data a crew captures does not stop at collection. It flows into make ready engineering, into pole loading analysis, into deliverable generation, into pole attachment application tracking, and into the long-lived attachment record, without re-entry or format conversion. The same photo set that proves a clearance also exports cleanly into the standard pole loading engines, including SPIDAcalc, O-Calc Pro, and PoleForeman, so the loading analysis runs on the field reality rather than on retyped numbers. It also documents the awkward field conditions that cause the most trouble later, like double wood, stub poles, and the historical attachments that never made it into a utility's records.

When you measure a field program by cost per finished deliverable instead of cost per crew-day, the picture changes. A two-person crew that clears 150 poles a day and produces a dataset that needs no re-collection and no reformatting is doing the work of more than the seat count suggests. This is the same labor producing a dramatically different result than other methods, because the data only had to be collected once and it was trustworthy and engineering-ready when it came back.

When Hugging the Pole Is Not the Right Call

There are lots of situations when a two person, boots-on-the-ground field crew is not the answer.

LiDAR is genuinely useful for corridor-level work and vegetation management. Drone or mobile LiDAR can lay down a spatial baseline across a long span of right-of-way faster than a crew can walk it, and for transmission corridors, vegetation programs, and broad clearance modeling, it can be the right tool. The honest limitation is what it does not deliver. LiDAR does not read the birthmark, the tag, the grounding, or the attacher-level equipment detail at the base of the pole, and in vegetated or congested environments, canopy penetration and airspace restrictions get in the way. The field acquisition is fast, but for attachment scopes the path from a raw point cloud to usable engineering data often is not. We have laid out the full set of tradeoffs around LiDAR for pole surveys separately, because the nuance matters.

One Note:

It is worth being precise about which poles a remote pass actually leaves for the crew, because that is where the cost lives. The poles a scan cannot resolve are not a random sample. They are the difficult ones: bases buried in vegetation, attacher detail and grounding that only reads from a few feet away, heights that need a clean line of sight the canopy will not give. Those poles were always going to be the expensive part of the job under any method, because the open, accessible poles are inexpensive to capture however you collect them. What a remote-first plan changes is when you discover the difficulty. If the scan was supposed to carry most of the work and the remaining foot visits turn out to be a large, scattered set of the hardest poles, you are re-bidding or re-mobilizing a separate field effort under a compressed timeline, often after the easy data already created the impression the project was nearly finished. A crew that captures everything on the first pass folds that difficulty into one mobilization instead of surfacing it as a second one later.

There are also many scopes that only need a simple data capture, and do not need full photogrammetric measurement at all. Underground facilities, simple inventory passes, joint use audits, and rapid non-pole collection are well served by quick photo capture without the calibration workflow, and 360-degree capture has a place for certain documentation tasks. Katapult Pro can be used for these, though many other solutions have simple data field and photo capture, too.

For the standard distribution attachment survey, the make ready package, and the pole loading analysis that depend on accurate heights and attacher-level detail, the data still lives at the pole, and a disciplined ground-based crew remains the most reliable, most defensible, and most economical way to get it.

Ready to Build a Field Program You Can Defend?

The field trip is the part of the workflow everything else inherits. Done well, it produces fast throughput, removes the most serious safety exposure from the routine, and leaves behind a record that holds up when a utility, an attacher, or a federal reviewer asks what was really on the pole. Done poorly, it produces the rework, the rollbacks, and the disputes that quietly erode margin and push construction past its deadlines.

We collect this way because we run it ourselves, every day, on our own customers' projects, and we have refined the method against thousands of real poles in real conditions. That is also why our software works the way it does. The platform is built by the people who do the work, and the field method and the system that turns photos into connected, defensible data were designed together.

If you are scoping a make ready program, a BEAD build, or an attachment audit and you want to see how disciplined two-person photo collection actually runs, book a walkthrough of how we collect, calibrate, and defend field data.

If you would rather start with a conversation about your specific scope and terrain, talk to our team about standing up field crews for your next program.