Utility Locating

The Utility Locating Division is dedicated to providing the most comprehensive locating service in the industry. Our field technicians average twelve (12) years of field locating experience and are considered some of the best technicians in the business. We utilize the latest state-of-the-art RF multi-frequency and single-frequency locating equipment to identify the position of buried utilities.

Pipe and Cable Locators: APS locating technicians utilize a wide variety of pipe and cable locating equipment with different frequencies, antenna sizes and shapes, power variability, signal outputs, connection methods, internal and external signal filters, and signal processing. Due to these options, it is possible that one piece of equipment that looks and performs very much like another in most situations may not detect or be able to trace a utility as well as the other instrument in other situations. It is up to the responsible professional to be familiar with the capabilities and differences in capabilities between these instruments and to have a sufficient variety of instrumentation available as necessary.

How times have changed: In the past, many utilities were relatively easy to detect with low cost methods. Utilities were generally metallic, electrically continuous, linear, shallow, and logically routed. Minimally trained technicians with limited equipment had a fair chance of finding these metallic utilities. This is changing rapidly with the advent of new materials (e.g. fiber optic glass, plastics, etc.),congested rights-of-way, and new construction methods such as directional drilling. These changes are significantly complicating the underground environment, subsequently requiring the use of more and improved methods and better-trained technicians. Utility detection is definitely an art not a science.