I’m not an expert with QGIS but my experience with it has been similar. I’ve found that I need to know exactly what projection is being loaded into QGIS so I can define it on the import. Probably my lack of exp but I’ve found moving it around or defining coords after it’s been imported can give bad results such as you described. I’ve always had to manually tell QGIS what coords every time I load something in for safety.

One of the common problems is drawing units in the source file. Like the geometry being drawn in meters but the units set as inches. FME reads the units set in the cadfile so the data will be off. You can check and correct this in the source using the UNITS command in AutoCad. I would check and eventually correct this first.

On the proces side of things, the Reprojector transformer is a correct way to do this. You just need to be sure the from and to systems are correct. What helps me is to know the EPSG code of the systems. I use EPSG.IO to help me with this.

FME reads VT83F from source, but double check if that is the correct interpretation. If it's drawn in meters you probably need VT83. I suspect you want to display the data on Google Maps, which is in Web Mercator/ EPSG:3857.

About (re)projection: When you want to display data from different coordinate systems on top of each other, you need to choose a base system you are going to use. If you want to use basemaps, like Google maps, it's good practice to use the basemap's system as the default one. Reprojecting world basemaps to local systems can result in strange visualisations. Next you have two options:

1. Reproject the data to the base coordinatesystem. Good performance and visuals, but you really recalculate the coordinates of your geometry. Changing it.
2. Let the software (QGIS for example) reproject the data on the fly. This affects performance and the renders are often lower quality, but you can now keep the data on it's original system.

I hope this helps.

How are you defining the projection on the import? When I add a vector layer and choose my shapefile it just adds the layer to the project and doesn't give me an option to define the projection.

How do you manually tell QGIS what coords?

At this point I have stopped using QGIS and have just been using Google Earth as it is easier and faster to go through testing and experimenting. Also, because I don't care about any other data at this point and am just trying to get the geometry of the one layer to position correctly.

I have tried changing the source coordinate system to several different options while keeping the coordinate system of the resulting ShapeFile set to EPSG:3857 (as per nielsgerrits's suggestion because I am using Google Earth). Each time no matter what I start with I end up with the geometry appearing over Africa. I have attached a screenshot of what I am seeing. Also, the geometry shouldn't be a straight line. In the DWG file it is drawn as kind of an "S" shape. I have attached a screenshot with the line it should be overlaid with a bold red line.

I have some questions about reprojecting in FMS as well.

Is there a difference between using the reprojector transformer and not using the transformer and just setting the coordinate system in the reader and writer. I do not seem to get any different results when using either method.

If I do use the transformer, does setting the coordinate system in the reader and writer have any effect on the output? What setting will end up taking priority?

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I did some effort to get this done but without any positive results. I still think the issue is in the source file. Your problem is probably related to this topic on the Autodesk forum. I don't understand it completely and have not any more time to research this now so I have to let it go for now...

Thank you for your assistance. I will see about getting a new source file to see if that was the issue all along.