SurveyTools — The Complete Guide: Survey Network Adjustment, Road and Rail Alignments and Coordinate Transforms
SurveyTools is an open-source (MIT licence) desktop toolkit for surveying engineers and infrastructure designers. It covers the computations between field data and final coordinates, and it runs on Windows and Linux.
SurveyTools (incl. Alignment Solver)
SurveyTools (open-source project)
Surveying toolkit: network adjustment, road and rail alignment solving, coordinate transforms and levelling.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Network adjustment — station and survey network adjustment, plus levelling adjustment.
- Transformations — coordinate conversion between systems.
- Alignment Solver — horizontal and vertical alignments for roads, railways and tunnels, including transition curves and cant.
- Setting out and measuring — calculations for setting out in the field, with batch processing.
- Files — LandXML, GSI and Trimble ASCII import and export, and editors for GSI and RW5 files.
Who it suits
Surveyors, site engineers and road and rail designers who need a standalone calculation tool without an expensive CAD suite. It is a relatively small project, so check the results against a familiar calculation before using it on a real project, and make sure the local coordinate system is set up correctly.
Related tools
To process raw GNSS observations — RTKLIB. To show points and alignments on a map — QGIS. For further drafting in DXF — LibreCAD.
RTKLIB
Tomoji Takasu
Centimetre-level GNSS post-processing — open-source RTK and PPK.
Get it from the vendor
QGIS
QGIS.org
Open-source GIS for spatial analysis, layer work and map production.
Get it from the vendor
LibreCAD
LibreCAD Project
Lightweight 2D drafting with layers, blocks and dimensions, built around the DXF format.
Get it from the vendor
Earth Point — coordinate converter
Earth Point
Converts between coordinate systems and shows the point on a map.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
SurveyTools brings into one free package the survey and alignment calculations that are usually spread across several expensive programs.