Working part time, even for anther surveyor, is one thing. Building your own business while competing with your employer is quite another. Part of an employee's job is to help bring in more work for the business. The only time I ever moonlighted, I was helping a friend with a engineering and surveying focused on residential and commercial clients. My full time employer was focused on state, railroad and utilities, so there was no competition. I spoke with the company president before agreeing to work part time for my friend, so there was no secrecy involved.
Generalcadd is just a drawing program. It's an offshoot of Generic Cadd which was an excellent program, which I used for my Survey business in Ohio, but I had to write a number of routines to bring my data into the program. Autodesk bought it to get it off the market as a competitor to AutoCAD LT. Several companies have produced Windows workalikes since Autodesk buried Generic Cad.
Were I you I would look at pieces of software produced by Carlson: Sight Survey and Carlson Survey. Both come with Intellicad included, with Sight Survey being the less costly, but both are good pieces of software. I used Microsurvey for years as County Engineer in Ohio while the Cadd engine was Felix Cadd, a good drawing engine. Since they joined the Intellicad consortium, it's also another excellent choice. You can view current pricing on their websites.
The problem that will drive you up the wall is that Microstation operates bass ackward as opposed to the way a draftsman thinks and normally operates. I used Microstation while I was at ODOT, and then a few years later at NCDOT. I've spent over 10 years using Carlson Civil Suite on Intellicad and I'm transitioning to Microstation and Geopak again. Microstation is annoying as a drawing program, with the drawing engine being inferior to Intellicad in ease of operation. I have tolerated the program, but I will never love Microstation.
Lately, I've checked out DraftSight and NanoCAD. The latter has a free basic version and reasonably priced "professional" versions. DraftSight is now subscription based and can get a bit pricey.
I do like the basic DraftSight for what I'm doing. My boss has decided to stick with AutoCAD LT since we are updating. I've only played with NanoCAD a little bit, but it seems like a decent program.
I don't know what to expect in the new AutoCAD, but in the past, when Autodesk has updated CAD, features we used about daily evaporated and other things were broken. Personally, I'd rather go with something that does more for cheaper. Oh well.
Land Surveyor's shouldn't be competing with one another. Ever hear of a doctor or lawyer say "I can beat that price"? Land Surveyors are not selling fish at a fish market, they're providing a professional service.
I don't bid. I work by the hour. If they want to use my service fine...if not so what?
When I was in business in the 1970's & 1980's, I did everything for an hourly fee. Most of my work was route surveys (probably 98%). In 1975 we surveyed almost 600 miles of gas pipelines and buried telephone cables around the State of Wyoming. All charged out for an hourly fee. At that time I had 11 people in the office and 24 people in the field. We also fit in some subdivisions and other surveys along with some engineering work. Lot of long hours and everyone had plenty of overtime also. Overtime was far cheaper costwise than hiring a bunch of new people.
Bricscad
I agree that BricsCAD is the best deal around if all you need is CAD software.?ÿ However, the OP indicated that what he really wants is surveying software that includes drafting capability, which is a very different matter.
or just be a luddite and go back to paper and pencil!?ÿ?ÿ
I always wanted to make my cad drawings look like they were hand drawn, but never really did.?ÿ I did look into getting a font made from my lettering.
...I always wanted to make my cad drawings look like they were hand drawn, but never really did.?ÿ I did look into getting a font made from my lettering.
I've had the very same pipe dream from time to time over the years.?ÿ I have seen some architectural styled files that made an attempt but seemed a little "cheesy" to me.?ÿ
I guess the demand for such isn't enough to warrant the trouble.
Character styles available are the same ones that are on your operating system and show up in the directory.
I remember having software that was capable of creating special characters and assigning that to a key on the keyboard and even the assignment of them to a special character keyboard.
Most cadd environments allow for the choice of keyboards like most word processing programs.
It would take a lot of time creating each letter and symbol and coming up with your own unique style that may be worth your efforts.
I have always used a character length of 1.125 for most basic lettering with an oblique angle of 0° for calls, Headrights and identifying monuments, 12° for deed references and 15° for roads and other labeled routes and double wide and triple wide letters for roads and waterways.
It is absolutely doable if you want to invest the time and effort, much like the time and effort involved in setting up Field to Field and the overall cadd environment you want to experience when you download your raw data into the program.
It would take a lot of time creating each letter and symbol
Sometime around 1990 I built a CAD shadow font from scratch, as AutoCAD didn't come with one (or if it did I never found it).?ÿ It was, indeed, a lot of work -- I laid out each character on grid paper and wrote the code for each by following along the layout, one line segment at a time.?ÿ I still use that font.
I have to agree about Carlson. After having used Eagle Point, Trav PC, Civil Soft, Retriever (a name from the past) and Microstation, I'd have to say Carlson is the easiest for me. I've never sat at a computer all day, so I'd have to say Carlson is the most intuitive for field guy to use.
I have a copy of Lot Plot, that I use in the field every now and then, on my Yuma2. I use it to COGO out deeds or lots in a subdivision and for line work rotation at times. It opens and writes .dwg and .dxf formats. It is really easy to use, but going from using Civil3D everyday to that, takes some thought.
Highly recommend Carlson Survey with Intellicad. We have 2 licenses for our small office and it has worked out great. Price is reasonable and the support staff has always been awesome about troubleshooting the few bugs we ran into.?ÿ
We bought 2 licenses in 2014 and just upgraded to 2019 last fall. I have a 2015 Carlson Survey license with AutoCad embedded at my home office and still prefer to use Intellicad.
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So it was YOU who beat me?! ????
I haven’t gotten past second best yet
