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Tower and Span Inventory
When a project extracts power lines and towers, Lidarvisor turns the corridor into an inventory: every support with its type, height and lean, and every span with its length, sag and clearances. You can read it in the viewer without downloading anything, correct it by hand, export it as CSV, and find it in the reports.
This page covers the Towers panel, the lean bands, colouring the corridor, correcting supports by hand, and what the reports say. For the attributes in the delivered files, see Vectorization.
What you need: tick Extract Power Lines and Extract Towers when you process the project (the Power line inspection preset ticks both). The vegetation figures come from the buffer and clearance zone analyses.
The Towers Panel
Opening It
- In the project tree, tick the Towers layer.
- Click the table icon on the Towers row (tooltip: Open the tower inventory).
The panel opens docked under the viewer, with two tabs: Towers and Spans. The Spans tab reads the Power Lines layer, so tick that layer too. The panel and the elevation profile panel share the same place: opening one closes the other.
The Towers Tab
One row per support, labelled T-014 and so on:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| ID | The support's label |
| Type | Lattice, Pole, Double pole, or Unknown |
| Source | Detected, Inferred (from the conductors), Bridge, or Added by hand, followed by where the height came from when it was not measured (for example height copied from a neighbour) |
| Height | The height of the support, from its base |
| Lean | The angle from vertical |
| Status | Upright, Watch, Alert, or Not measurable, from the project's lean bands |
| Spans | The spans attached to the support |
| Findings | The vegetation findings nearest to it |
The Spans Tab
One row per span, labelled SP-003 and so on: From and To (the two supports), Length, Sag, Ground and Vegetation clearance, Findings, Quality, and the number of Conductors.
Quality reads Complete, A conductor is broken inside the span, or One end has no tower (for example where the line leaves the survey). Sag and clearance are as surveyed on the day of the flight, not at maximum operating temperature. A clearance that was never computed reads as not measured, never as zero.
Projects processed before the span figures were introduced have no span attributes on their power lines; the Spans tab says so.
Sorting, Filtering and Searching
- Sort by any column by clicking its header; click again to reverse the order.
- Filter with the chips above the table. On the Towers tab: Leaning (Watch or Alert), Not measurable, Added by hand, Inferred, With findings. On the Spans tab: Low ground clearance, Low vegetation clearance, With findings, Incomplete. With several chips on, a row shows if it matches any of them.
- Search by tower or span label. The counter above the table shows how many rows match.
Exporting as CSV
The download icon (Download the rows shown, as CSV) saves the rows currently shown on the active tab, with your filters applied, as a CSV file named after the project, the tab and the date. The towers file carries the identifiers, type, source, height and its source, lean figures and band, adjacent spans, findings, base elevation and position; the spans file carries the span figures. Units follow the project (metres or feet).
Row Actions
- Click a row to highlight the support on the map. The camera does not move.
- Fly to it (target icon) moves the camera to the support or span.
- Two cuts through this tower, along and across the line opens two profiles through the real points at the support, drawn with its fitted axis and the vertical. When the line's direction is unknown, the cuts run north to south and west to east.
- A profile along this span opens a profile between the two supports' bases.
- Correct this tower opens the Towers layer for editing, see below.
In the viewer, clicking a vegetation finding shows its Span and Nearest tower; clicking either opens the panel on that row.
Lean Bands
The lean bands decide where a support turns from Upright to Watch, and from Watch to Alert. They are a setting of the project, not of the processing:
- In the Towers panel, click the tune icon (Lean bands).
- Set Watch above and Alert above, in degrees. Each value is saved when you leave the field.
The defaults are 2° and 5°. A band must be greater than zero and at most 45°, and Watch must be below Alert. A support exactly on a band edge falls in the higher band. Changing the bands costs nothing and reprocesses nothing: the viewer and the panel use the new values straight away, and the project report uses them the next time it is generated.
Colouring the Corridor
The Colour button on the layer rows changes what the colours mean:
- Towers: by Type, or by Lean in the project's bands (Upright green, Watch orange, Alert red, Not measurable grey). Lean is offered once at least one support has a measured lean.
- Power Lines: Default, Ground clearance, or Vegetation clearance. In a clearance mode, each line takes the worst clearance of its span. The thresholds are the project's own clearance and buffer distances. A conductor below the ground surface reads Below the ground.
In both cases, red marks the worst end of the scale: the supports that lean most, or the spans closest to the ground or the vegetation. On the map, a dashed ring marks a support inferred from the conductors, a solid ring one added or corrected by hand, and a faded support one whose shape was not measured. The layer row's legend says the same.
Adding, Moving or Retyping a Support
A support the detection missed can be placed by hand, and a misplaced or mistyped one corrected:
- Click Edit on the Towers layer row (or Correct this tower in the panel).
- Pick the Type: Lattice, Pole, or Double pole.
- To add a support, click the top of the support in the point cloud. The base is taken from the terrain model, and the height is the difference. If your click lands on the ground, the height is copied from the nearest support of the same type; if there is none, type the height in the Height field. A message tells you which happened.
- To move a support, drag it. The Height field of the selected support can be edited.
- Click Save, then the sync icon on the layer row to apply your edits and regenerate the export files.
When the edits are applied, Lidarvisor measures again each support you added or moved against the real points around it (structure, base and lean), recomputes the spans on either side (splitting a span at an added support and joining two at a deleted one), and rewrites the Towers and Power Lines layers. The rows show Measuring... while this runs. Changing only the type or a typed height is kept exactly as you set it, without a new measurement. The vegetation clearance figures of the spans are carried over, not recomputed.
A support placed by hand is marked Added by hand, and its tower_uid is kept through later edits. Editing costs no credits. The project needs a DTM for the base to be placed on the ground.
In the Reports
- The project report has a Leaning towers section, using the project's lean bands: how many supports fall in each band, a table of the towers in the Watch or Alert band (worst first, up to 40, with their type, lean, direction, top offset and band, flagged when the measurement is of low confidence), and a separate table of the supports whose lean could not be measured, with the reason. See Reports.
- The vegetation encroachment report has a Corridor summary by span: the 20 spans closest to the vegetation, with their supports, length, vegetation clearance, findings and quality. A clearance that was never computed reads not measured, never 0. The Spans CSV carries every span.
Your Plan
Viewing the layers, the Towers panel, its CSV export, the colour modes, the lean bands and the sections are available on every plan. Downloading the Towers and Power Lines layers, the 3D structures, the findings and the reports requires a paid plan, like every deliverable (see Downloading and Exporting).
Next Step
For the full power line workflow, from upload to remediation plan, see the Utility Guide.