MAXIBOR

In 1988 development work on a "solid state" version of the Fotobor was started. Richard Parfitt of Chardec Consultants based near Brighton, Sussex (England) had been working on image/template recognition using CCD devices and suggested to Reflex that this would be a useful technology to use in a digital version of the Fotobor. Reflex had previously been considering buying in optic fibre technology. (Personal communication Richard Parfitt to the author - Sept 2007).

This digital Fotobor was named Maxibor. The "bor" part of the name is logical but the author has no idea where the "Maxi" came from unless it was a follow-on from the Minibor (an unrelated class of survey tool previously developed by Chardec for Reflex).

The design and development of the survey tool, its electronics and internal software (actually firmware) were carried out entirely by Chardec Consultants. The operation of the Maxibor was entirely based on the operation of the Fotobor (based on the original concepts and design of Mats Haglund). The following were (and still are) the major differences:

1. The Maxibor used two reflector rings (Fotobor used three - however, the third was only used as a quality check - not in the main calculations. The same check could be made using two rings).
2. The Maxibor used CCDs to record the reflector ring locations and returned the ring co-ordinates. In the Fotobor this process was done by film (which needed to be developed and the ring co-ordinates extracted using a digitising process).
3. The Maxibor stored it's data in an on-board memory store (it could be argued that the Fotobor film served this purpose)
4. Data could be quickly downloaded from the Maxibor and the surveys calculated almost immediately.

GeoMEM Software designed and developed the software that operated on the field computers (the good old workhouse the Husky Hunter 16, a DOS based rugged field PC).