@jim-frame I run Carlson Survey over Civil 3D and the pricing is wildly different between a shop with one or two seats versus a larger corporation.
I was the 12th employee when I started my survey department 9 years ago and was the only Carlson user. If I remember correctly, we had 4 other seats of Civil 3D on the engineering side. Flas ahead those 9 years and we have 85 employees with probably 60 using C 3D with the yearly maintenance agreements and get the advantage of volume discounts. The same is true with our field equipment, I now have 8 crews and upgrade 2 guns per year to stay ahead of tech changes, each crew also has an RTK package. I made it clear when I bought the first gun that I would expect discounts as we grew or I would switch brands and that has worked out well too but the smaller shop doesn't have that kind of leverage.
Thats Awesome Chris...
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I first used Autocad in the mid 80s not for surveying decided to make a solar system to scale. (My Father worked at an Engineering firm and worked long hours we used to got there after hours to see him)
Between that and high school drafting classes I should have know where I would end up.
In the field of course!!
I hate sitting at a desk, would not be drafter if you threatened to cut off my legs.
that said...
Microstation is hands above autocad for surveyors... unless you already learned autocad. I had some experience with autocad (like I had experience with Word processers like WordSTAR). So when I was asked to do some annotation work in it, and was told , IT IS completely counterintuitive...
No... AutoCAD is counterintuitive. MicroStation is setup for surveyors.
I did the annotation work, only fell asleep twice and was told how amazing I was getting it done faster than the EITs.
Also Microstation is required for DoT projects in these parts. Was told it had to be ground up because of this or that... Bentley really makes a good product the icons make sense. There is no weird terminology. You want to make an angle off a line? Go ahead and do it! There is no weird having to rotate the whole world.
EDIT: Also, civil3d if you are using Autodesk is a must for surveyors. Not really sure how you can input points in regular autocad. Civil3D does not make it easy but it is a bit more straight forward. Create a network folder and a point database, import the points to the database, then import that into civil3d and assign it to your project through a project folder.
Much more straightforward than other CAD software that says "import points" and you are done