Martin Sluka wrote:Many problems solve DistoX + PocketTopo or other program for online sketching or DistoX + Auriga. You may change the scale, use splayshots, etc.Survex (or Therion inspired by Survex) has quite powerful possibilities to work with such complicated data: flags ignore, duplicate, nosurvey, ... Check Survex manual:
http://survex.com/docs/manual.pdf
I concur with Martin. I may sound like I'm preaching for my own church, but given the software is free, I feel less shame ;)
Using a PDA, you may take a lot of splay measures to walls, rocks, stalactites or any other significant detail that can help you sketch. These will automatically appear on your line plot, making your sketch like drawing by numbers. You may indeed do the same on paper, but you may find it tedious to draw all those lines manually before you start sketching.
Few PC software support splay measures. Compass will eventually, and Therion already does. But since sketching takes place underground, it's not so important when you're back home. The upcoming (September) version 2.05 of Auriga will export survey shots as a CSV file, with splay measures as an option. A tester tells me he got good success at importing this file into Therion, including splay measures.
Leaving the measuring tape on the ground may help sketching a bit, but at best you have only one tape, and none if you use a laser rangefinder. And laser beams don't tend to persist for long once the Disto is turned off or moved ;)