I currently use Autocad Civil 3D for all Cad work and am dissatisfied with everything that pertains to land survey functions. I don't mind the CAD portion of it but want something better to help with calculations, closures, section corner work, error analysis, least squares adjustment, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions of a program that isn't overly expensive that they prefer?
I'm a big StarNet fan for LS adjustments. You might also consider Carlson Survey as an add on to your C3d.
I will second Norman's suggestion on Star*Net.
I have demoed it and find it quite nice.
I do not own it, though, since I am satisfied with the capabilities of Civil3D Survey. It's a bit clunky, no argument here! But, the math is good, and as long as you feed good raw data, you'll get good Least Squares reductions.
It took a while to get comfy with Civil3D Survey. But, since I run a shop where we do engineering and survey, it makes sense for me - because the true power of Civil is in engineering.
As for survey and boundary comps... we've gotten pretty good using the autoCAD line work engine to graphically do our "what-ifs" scenarios, and a hefty use of blocks for reference plans, and plan closing, etc.
It took me about a year to come to grips with it. But it was a long, ugly year! 🙂
Take a look at MicroSurvey. It was created for Land Surveying and I believe that your license can be used to run either the standalone Intellicad or the AutoCAD embedded version.
MicroSurvey is also the company you buy StarNET from so for all I know the processing tool may be built into their other software.
http://www.microsurvey.com/products/starnet/
I gather you are satisfied with current to do any real Cad work?
If so I'd give Microsurvey a miss. It's Cad is not as good as AutoCad and I imagine you could be rather frustrated with its Cad side. But that's from no knowledge of your current setup.
I know AutoCad version of Microsurvey is okay but wouldn't recommend the IntelliCad side. I've run it for ages through many versions of Microsurvey and Windows, 32 and 64 bit.
If your current Cad is okay I'd go for the best non (pure) cad system I could find that really runs survey routines. If such a beast exists?
I'm not saying Microsurvey can't handle the survey routines, but you mentioned cost and it's not cheap if all you are after is the survey routines.
And of survey routines, I find traverse and cogo whilst good is frustrating from the file locations it finds itself in.
It easily (very) gets itself lost and you have to go and find where it is supposed to know where to look.
That bites hard sometimes when one has to mount a search party to go on from where you just left off!:-(
I'm going to give microsurvey a try. I would really like to find something that doesn't have much CAD function but haven't found anything yet.
If you use Carlson data collectors , you will pull your hair out with Microsurvey and Starnet .
We do. Thanks for the info. I'll see what it does and might go the Carlson Survey way.
StarNet is probably the best LS adj and error analysis software for surveyors period. I use Trimble business center now quite a bit for the same thing as well.
> StarNet is probably the best LS adj and error analysis software for surveyors period.
StarNet can also be used to resolve raw data to coordinates, as for topo data where no adjustment is appropriate.
If you demo Carlson the C&G menu contains many of the items on your laundry list. I still use the DOS version of this program.
For calculations and boundary drafting it is a workhorse.
Not the best for drafting an engineering design topo though. One quickly misses the bells and whistles in a modern CAD platform.
I think Carlson is definitely worth exploring.