Surveying in the Stone Age

Don’t you hate when you try to find something on the internet and can’t find the data? I do.

I hope to correct this deficiency with this blog post. My problem is trying to convert a cr5 file to text and then from text to cr5. For those of you who don’t know, cr5 is an old file format created by TDS. TDS used to be owned by HP, but was sold to Trimble a long time ago. The cr5 file format was at one time the default format utilized by the TDS data collectors. A while later they wrote their software to utilize a job file format and a fbk format. This was many moons ago. Since it was many moons ago, and a company ago, the cr5 file isn’t well supported. If you want to use the originally provided Survey Link program you need a dongle to run it and I’ve also heard rumors the dongle doesn’t like any Windows operating system after XP.

So what is one to do today? Utilize the hidden Survey Link that comes with Civil 3D of course! Of course you are probably thinking to your self, I checked out the ribbon and couldn’t find the a command that sounded like it would do the task. Well I couldn’t find it either. The solution is to type STARTSURVEYLINK at the command line. This will open up Survey Link. If it doesn’t happen to be installed you can find a link here. When opening through Civil 3D it does not require a dongle and will work as normal.

Also if you have moved from the stone age to the bronze age of computing don’t forget about the download to Trimble Link that will allow your data collector to interact directly with Civil 3D.

Civil 3D 2015: http://ww2.trimble.com/link_ts.asp?Nav=Collection-63438

Other Releases: http://ww2.trimble.com/link_ts.asp?Nav=Collection-63439