Software and Hardware for BS5837 surveys

[Nathan84]

At the moment I do BS5837 surveys with a notebook and paper plan in the field and then type into excel and draw a survey plan in AutoCAD.  This is time consuming.  Can anyone recommend the best hardware and software to use in the field and in the office to make this as time efficient as possible.  I heard there are ways of entering all the data into a hand held device in the field which can then be exported to autocad which will do the drawing for you.  Please help, much appreciated.

[Nathan84]

Anyone?

[Paul Barton]

Hi Nathan,

 

If you haven’t already, it would be worth searching the forum for old threads about this.

 

As you may already know, there are some off the shelf package softwares that will enable you to do what you need but it depends on the output you require - I.e a CAD plan or an Excel spreadsheet etc. 

 

I just use an iPad with a pre-formatted spreadsheet in Numbers and then send that to my CAD technician with a copy of a marked up topo plan.  

 

Check out Pear Technology software for an alternative. 

[Gary Prentice]

12 hours ago, Paul Barton said:

I just use an iPad with a pre-formatted spreadsheet in Numbers and then send that to my CAD technician with a copy of a marked up topo plan.  

Oooh, look at you! A CAD technician of your very own  

 

 

 

[Gary Prentice]

On 18/05/2018 at 16:32, Nathan84 said:

At the moment I do BS5837 surveys with a notebook and paper plan in the field and then type into excel and draw a survey plan in AutoCAD.  This is time consuming.  Can anyone recommend the best hardware and software to use in the field and in the office to make this as time efficient as possible.  I heard there are ways of entering all the data into a hand held device in the field which can then be exported to autocad which will do the drawing for you.  Please help, much appreciated.

I've a Getac data collector into which I've put an Excel spreadsheet for the survey. Because it's older, it's a bit of messing about and I'm not quite there, but the idea is that I can take the SD card out, plug into the laptop, open the topo in Keysofts Tree Program and then import into the drawing. 

 

Basically the CAD program says,"right, got T1, where do you want to plot it. etc.

 

Still need a paper plan on site, to reference tree numbers to, but hopefully once I've created all the excel drop down lists for all the input cells, it'll be pretty rapid. I've gone this way because it's cheap, starting out I can't afford to spend thousands on new dedicated devices and programs.

[Paul Barton]

Forgot to say, I also now mostly label up the topo plan on the iPad too using an app called DWG Fastview. It works pretty well so no more paper flapping about on a clipboard!