The $200 total station we bought off eBay actually works better than our $8k one

I mean, we got it for a small site in Lubbock just to have a backup that we didnt care about. It showed up with a cracked screen and duct tape on the battery. But three weeks in, the pricey one started throwing bad angles after a firmware update, and this junky thing has been spot on every single time. Maybe it's just that it's dumb and simple, no gps glitches, no cloud sync nonsense. Has anyone else had a cheap tool out-perform the fancy one on a job? Or are we just getting lucky with the calibration?

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dylan_thompson28d ago

Three weeks in is still the honeymoon phase though. I've seen cheap gear hold up for a month and then drift worse than a drunk guy at a karaoke bar. The cracked screen and tape job tells me it's been knocked around, which usually messes with the calibration eventually. The expensive one acting up after a firmware update sounds like a dumb software problem, not a hardware failure. I'd give it another month before crowning the eBay special.