A great deal of high-quality surveying reference material is published by government agencies and is free to download, in the public domain or freely redistributable. For a candidate preparing for the Fundamentals of Surveying exam it can cover a large share of the technical ground at no cost.
Two honest caveats before the list. First, none of this material was written to prepare anyone for an examination; it is reference and procedure documentation, and it is long. Second, and more importantly, the exam specification and the reference material used during the exam come from the exam provider. Buy or download the official versions of those from NCEES, the body that develops and administers the exam. No free substitute exists for them, and study guides claiming otherwise are not reliable.
Bureau of Land Management: the Manual of Surveying Instructions
The federal manual governing surveys of the public lands is the single most valuable free document for the boundary portion of your preparation. It sets out the principles of the public land survey system, the rules for subdividing sections, the treatment of evidence and monuments, and the distinction between original and retracement surveys.
For candidates in eastern states where the public land system does not apply, this material is likely to be entirely unfamiliar and is exactly the sort of gap that costs marks. Read the sections on the system's structure, on subdividing sections, and on evidence and monument principles. You do not need to read the whole manual.
National Geodetic Survey publications
The National Geodetic Survey, part of NOAA, publishes an extensive free library covering geodesy, datums, reference frames, geoid models, coordinate systems and control survey procedure. This is the best free material available for the geodesy portion of the specification, and geodesy is consistently among the weakest areas for candidates from a field background.
- Material on datums and reference frames, and on why coordinates for the same monument differ between them.
- Explanations of the relationship between ellipsoid height, geoid height and orthometric elevation, which is a reliable source of exam questions.
- Documentation of state plane coordinate systems, scale factors and the grid-to-ground relationship.
- Guidance on control survey procedures, accuracy standards and how uncertainty is expressed.
- Online computational tools that let you check your own hand computations against an authoritative implementation, which is a genuinely effective way to study coordinate conversions.
State department of transportation survey manuals
Most state transportation departments publish a survey manual, and many are excellent, freely downloadable, and far more readable than their length suggests. They are written to instruct working survey crews, which makes them practical rather than theoretical.
They are particularly good on alignment geometry and stationing, construction staking practice, control survey specifications and accuracy requirements, levelling procedures, and photogrammetric mapping requirements. Read one from a state with terrain unlike yours as well as your own; the differences in emphasis are instructive. Note that the details are jurisdiction-specific by design, so use them to learn principles and procedures rather than as a source of universal rules.
USGS and other federal material
| Source | Useful for |
|---|---|
| USGS lidar base specification | Lidar fundamentals, classification, point density and quality levels; good coverage of the remote sensing portion |
| USGS topographic mapping documentation | Map accuracy concepts, contour representation, quadrangle structure and map reading |
| NOAA tides and currents publications | Tidal datums and water level concepts, relevant to water boundaries and hydrographic topics |
| Federal Geographic Data Committee standards | Spatial data accuracy standards and metadata concepts, which support the GIS portion |
| US Army Corps of Engineers engineering manuals | Detailed public-domain treatments of control, hydrographic survey and construction survey practice |
| Land survey records held by state and county agencies | Real recorded plats and surveys, which are the best free way to learn how descriptions and plats are actually written |
The Corps of Engineers manuals deserve a specific mention. They are written as instruction, they are thorough, they cover control, hydrographic and construction surveying in depth, and they are freely available. For the measurement and error analysis portions of the specification they are among the better free options in existence.
Other genuinely free options
- Older surveying textbooks that have entered the public domain. The mathematics and geometry of plane surveying have not changed, and a century-old text on traverse computation and curves is still correct; ignore the instrumentation chapters entirely.
- University course materials published openly by surveying and geomatics programmes, which frequently include problem sets with worked solutions.
- Professional society local chapters, many of which run low-cost or free review sessions for candidates and are usually happy to be asked.
- Public libraries, which can obtain current surveying textbooks through interlibrary loan at no cost.
- Your employer's technical library, which in an established survey firm often contains exactly the references you need.
How to use free material without drowning in it
- Work from the current exam specification. Let it decide which sections of which documents you open.
- Diagnose your weak areas first, then go looking. Reading a federal manual because it is free and available is not a study plan.
- Read selectively. These documents are reference works and are not meant to be read cover to cover; use their tables of contents aggressively.
- Convert reading into problems. After a section, work problems on that topic. Reading alone produces almost no exam performance.
- Note the publication date of anything you read, because datums, geoid models and specifications are revised and older documents describe superseded versions.
- Stop when the return falls. Once a topic is no longer producing errors in your practice, move on regardless of how much of the document remains unread.
Used this way, free public material can carry most of your subject-matter preparation. What it cannot substitute for is the official specification, the official practice material, and hours of timed problem-solving — and those three are what actually determine the outcome.