Let's assume that you want to see a doctor to get a diagnosis for a potential medical problem. When you make the appointment you get told that the doctor won't be able to see you (as a matter of fact, he is not even close to where you are), but instead a nurse will see you and run some tests on you. She will then forward the test results to the doctor and that doctor will then determine what treatment, if any, you need. I fully expect that you would not accept something like that, but you may be wondering why I am mentioning this.
The reason is that it is similar to a practice that is strongly promoted by some in the geotechnical industry: take the measurements during a Dynamic Load Test, send them to somebody who has never been on the job site, and that person will determine the capacity of the pile. To me that makes about as much sense as the example I mentioned at the beginning of this message. The outcome of a Dynamic Load Test determines whether a pile can be accepted as is, but in order to properly analyze the data you need to be fully aware of the local conditions, and that is impossible if it is done by somebody who has never set foot on the job site.
I'm sure that some of you disagree with the above and I look forward to hearing from you. Hopefully your response will address the need for awareness of local site conditions during a load test and how somebody far away could possibly have this knowledge, because that is really what this issue is all about.
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I don't see why a site visit has to be made to interpret the PDA and do the CAPWAP analysis. The tester will not have any magical means of seeing the soil conditions below the ground surface even if he is on site. So if a borehole log could be provided to him, he could just as easily review it and the PDA data remotely than from on-site.
I don't think Geodude understands my rational. It has nothing to do with living in the past, and I am all for the use of new technologies. But as somebody recently pointed out to me, documents providing design and construction information may not be readily available to those persons interpreting the test results, and important details may be overlooked. For that reason alone I think it is essential that the person analyzing the test data is the person who attended the test. Obviously he or she may get help from somebody else, but a full understanding of the local conditions is absolutely required to analyze the test data correctly.
And then there is a second important consideration, and I will use that as the subject of another blog: there seems to be a correlation between the accuracy of the prediction and the distance from the test site to where the person analyzing the data lives. More about that later.