Alabama Professor Uses High-Accuracy Positioning Data to Build Water System in Remote Rwandan Village

Christian Brodbeck is an engineering professor with Alabama’s Auburn University. On a recent trip to East Africa, he and six students constructed a water distribution system in an isolated village in Rwanda where there is no electricity or running water. And, of course, no WiFi. Yet Brodbeck has received some of the highest accuracy positioning data possible in a region as remote as any in the world.

In an article in Civil + Structural Engineering, Brodbeck talks about how he and the students used a Trimble® R2 GNSS receiver and Trimble CenterPoint® RTX satellite-delivered correction services to perform positioning fieldwork in a very desolate community, without relying on VRS or RTK. The R2 supports real-time time correction services, with CenterPoint RTX capable of delivering accuracy of better than 2 centimeters.

“It’s mind-boggling to me that I am out in the middle of nowhere and this piece of equipment is getting amazing accuracy,” Brodbeck noted.

The project was so successful that the team plans to use CenterPoint RTX to build similar water systems in equally remote regions of Africa. For the full story on how they used the R2 and CenterPoint RTX on site click here.