More radio amateur grid squares

Toronto, as understood by the Maidenhead Locator system

After yesterday’s post, I went a bit nuts with working out the whole amateur radio grid locator thing (not that I’m currently likely to use it, though). I’d hoped to provide a shapefile of the entire world, but that would be too big for the format’s 2GB file size limit.

What I can give you, though, is:

  • A Perl program that will generate a shapefile of an entire Maidenhead grid field, down to the subsquare level: make_grid.pl. You’ll need Geo::Shapelib to make this work. 324 (= 182) of these files would cover the whole world, and at 8MB or so a pop, things get unwieldy quickly.
  • A Google Earth KML file covering the whole world in 20° by 10° grid fields: Maidenhead_Locator_World_Grid. (If you’re feeling nerdy, here it is in Shapefile format: Maidenhead_Locator_World_Grid-shp).

If anyone would like their grid square in Google Earth format, let me know.

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