Ummm, I'm sorry I don't quite understand your post fully. FIS is an ATSOCAS, however if he was saying that we could enter ("no altitude"), when outside it would be a FIS - that's if he was saying we could enter. Secondly,
AFAIK, you cannot be given a RAS as VFR (which we were) as any radar vectoring or level restrictions might place you in IMC...
EDIT: Also, he should have had us on SSR with alt readout as we were given a sqk from Tower (which is obtained from Radar). And we were Mode C Altitude reporting the entire time.