What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Ground Penetrating Radar?
Ground penetrating radar lets you see every burial without digging, saving time, money, and heritage. It is quick, non-destructive, and pairs with GPS to build precise digital cemetery maps. Downsides: clay or water-logged soils weaken the signal and careless reading can mislead, so its vital to hire trained experts like the technicians at Sentry Mapping.
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is the core tool behind Sentry Mapping’s professional cemetery mapping service. Rolling a low-power antenna cart across the turf, the system sends radio pulses into the soil and records reflections from disturbed layers, vault fragments or voids—ideal for grave locating, unmarked grave detection and utility avoidance.
Key advantages include:
- Non-invasive scanning that protects fragile monuments and heritage
- High coverage—two technicians can scan several acres a day, turning decades of paper records into accurate digital cemetery mapping and a burial plot map tied to centimeter-level GPS
- Immediate insights—real-time profiles show occupied versus open plots, supporting smart space planning and revenue protection.
- Seamless integration—each radar hit flows straight into our cemetery management software, giving staff and visitors a searchable, web-based cemetery GIS map.
Disadvantages, and how Sentry Mapping manages them: heavy clay or saturated soils can weaken the signal, so surveys are timed for drier spells and antenna frequency adjusted; raw hyperbolas can mislead the untrained, so GPR-certified technicians cross-check results with GPS and drone imagery to ±6-inch accuracy; and standard 400–900 MHz antennas read best to about eight to ten feet—if a target sits deeper, alternate methods are recommended.
With the right expertise provided by Sentry Mapping’s experts, GPR delivers a fast, respectful and verifiable map of every marked and unmarked grave.