I'm sure not an expert, but My wife and I, and her siblings embarked in an "epic" surveying adventure this last December. We surveyed and split many hundreds of acres into smaller pieces of hundreds of acres. The terrain was varied and rugged, and included roads, streams, woods, right of ways, tillable fields, 6 different building sites, and pastures. The bill was over 20,000.00.
After going through all of that, and asking the "man" allot of questions, I do have a few "fun facts" of things that I learned that may interest you.
1) A surveyor is definately a skilled trade:laugh: The math and geometry that goes into the process is unbelievable. Some might say "but now it's all GPS" but, they still have to locate the monments and origin stakes, further in heavy tree cover and certain terrain, GPS doesn't work.
2) a legal survey is accurate to 1/100th of a foot
3) when an existing fence line of an "old survey" is found to be inaccurate, usually, in court, a modern accurate survey trumps the old one.
4) The surveyor corrects for the magnetic variances, and the curvature of the earth...still small errors creep in, and there are areas of "no mans lands" that all have to be worked out.
5) google earth is pretty damn good at getting close
6) the surveyor has to work closely with the county and you attorney to pull everything together at the end...all of the legal descriptions, easments, right of ways, DNR liens, etc.
So I guess you can get close yourself, I think, but you probably already know pretty close where your property line already is, and I don't think you could get any closer with a compass and GPS
Any "squabbles" one may have with the neighbors or "dirty hippies" would need to be resolved with a legal survey anyway.
But it would be fun to play around with a transit, and see how close you could get to a "known good survey"