Last week when I was at the Wyoming Engineering and Survey convention in Cheyenne Wyoming (which I should add was the warmest and least windy place I had been in two weeks–really) I found that I could not import a DWG file directly. It turns out that the cad file converter program was not installed with FAST Survey. I was able to enable the functionality by copying the converter from a valid SurvCE version 2.52 installation to my FAST Survey installation on my PM200.
Yesterday, Ashtech posted the converter on the FTP site (ftp://ftp.ashgps.com) under “/Land Survey/FAST Survey/Software/CADConversion/”. To install them, just copy the cadfileconv.exe file into the folder where the fast survey executable is installed.
The converter allows you to directly import a DWG file into FAST. There is an interesting option which will automatically build a Feature Code List from attributes encapsulated within a DWG file.
You can play with this feature by exporting a DWG file from ArcGIS, then importing it into FAST. All of the feature codes will automatically populate your FAST job. It is pretty darn slick, if you need this kind of thing.
iG GPS 
hi mark…
i’m Arif, from Malaysia. I also used ashtech GPS, which also used Fast Survey. Is this converter can solve the explode problem in Autocad sofware? actually i’ve faced a problem, when i export the data to .dwg, in Autocad software, it cannot be explode, otherwise the data will turn into mess.
thanks.
Again, is this CAD converter compatible with mobilemapper 6 because i used that device to run the Fast Survey. currently I used version 2.6.0.
the link that you gave above require a user name and password. how can i get it so i can download the converter?
thanks.
The cad converter will work with FAST Survey. I noticed that it is no longer on the Ashtech website. Perhaps it is installed with the latest FAST Survey version 2.8.6 automatically.