Category Archives: GIS

maps are just one way of looking at it

More radio amateur grid squares

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 … Continue reading

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Maidenhead Grid Locator, in Perl

Amateur radio operators sometimes use the Maidenhead Grid Locator Square system to identify location. Here’s my attempt at a translator, written in slightly squirrelly Perl: Grid square to lat/long and grid square shapefiles to follow. Amateur radio operators sometimes use … Continue reading

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image georeferencing with QGIS

Quantum GIS (QGIS) has a very powerful image georeferencing module. What that allows you to do is convert screen pixels to a map of an area. The pixels could be from a scanned map or from a screen image. Scanned … Continue reading

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Garmin vs Arduino GPS dance-off

So I built a GPS logger. It’s an Arduino Uno with the SparkFun microSD and GPS shields. No display, massively unwieldy, but it does spit out a track point every second and logs it fairly reliably to microSD. It works … Continue reading

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fixing garmin file dates

While the Garmin GPSMap 60csx is a lovely unit, it saves its tracks on the card with a date just slightly younger than I am. The following Unix one-liner will correct the file dates to the actual dates the data … Continue reading

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The SpatiaLite Cookbook

Alessandro‘s new SpatiaLite Cookbook is rather good. Alessandro‘s new SpatiaLite Cookbook is rather good.

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Interfacing the Pharos GPS-500 to Mac OS X

I’m stopping short of calling this “Using the Pharos GPS-500 to Mac OS X” because all I’ve been able to do is read raw NMEA sentences from the device. But that might be of use to you. The Source is … Continue reading

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Magellan Triton 400 micro-review

My office’s Garmin was stuck in a branch office last week, and we needed a GPS for the next morning, so we got a cheapo Magellan Triton 400 for $90 at Future Shop. I think that’s a clearance price, and … Continue reading

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Got a receiver inside my head – writing Spectrum Direct data as CSV

Industry Canada publishes the locations of all licensed radio spectrum users on Spectrum Direct. You can find all the transmitters/receivers near you by using its Geographical Area Search. And there are a lot near me: While Spectrum Direct’s a great … Continue reading

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making of the Canada Day post

Making the My Neighbourhood, Canada Day 2010 post took a bit of planning. Hardware I attached an Ultrapod to the stem of my bike, and added another velcro wrap for security. The GPSMAP 60CSx fitted quite nicely under the bungees … Continue reading

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