Fundamental station

A fundamental point (in German Fundamentalpunkt) is the geometric origin of a geodetic network and defines the geodetic datum of a national survey.

Some fundamental stations are an astronomical or satellite geodetic observatory. In any case, the geographic latitude and longitude of the station is precisely determined by methods of astrogeodesy and is chosen as ellipsoidal latitude and longitude at the Earth ellipsoid which is used to calculate the coordinates of the whole network.