Survey Software

[PeterVICEG]

I need new software for cave survey work. I have On Station but I am now a Mac user.
I am a bit out of touch. What are all of you now using? Any reccomendations would be welcome. Needs to run on the Mac, work in metric, and of course work under and out of the water.

Thanks,

Peter

[apitkin]

Unfortunately not really any survey software that runs directly under Mac OS. I am a big fan of Compass and until recently used to run it under Windows XP on a partition on my iMac. Recently I installed Crossover Pro (a version of Wine, the Linux Windows emulator) and it seems to work fine with that, which is much more convenient than rebooting each time I want to use it. The new SVG export program means I can import line plots directly into Illustrator for Mac for map drawing.

I don't know much about On Station but you may be able to do the same thing. Compass works well for both dry and underwater caves; many explorers and surveyors are using it. It has lots of cool features and can handle anything from a tiny survey to a massive multi-year complex project.

Some software will import and export surveys in the others' formats, which means that you don't necessarily have to commit to one program for ever.

Andy

[jlillest]

Survex (http://survex.com/) will run on Mac OS X. Like the rest of the good cave survey software out there it has its strengths and annoying lack of critical components. I've started working on a project recently that uses Survex for all their data and was surprised to find that Survex doesn't plot dive data correctly. If you're a Unix programmer and are used to makefiles and the sort then you might like Survex, but for everyone else it's a pain in the ass.

Interestingly enough, I've also had trouble getting Compass to plot dive data correctly.

My overall preference is Walls (http://www.utexas.edu/tmm/sponsored_sites/tss/Walls/tsswalls.htm) because I know how to make it do all the things I need to do, including exporting SVGs to Illustrator to draw cave maps. Oh yeah, and it does plot dive data correctly. Be prepared to spend more time learning how to use Walls though.

-Jon

[JimB]

Another alternative could be to run Parallels (http://www.parallels.com/) or VirtualBox (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/overview/index.html) on your Mac. This way you could run your old OS on a virtual machine and still be able to run you old software on it.