Mark asked: What kind of GIS software are you using?
Well, since you asked:-
- SpatiaLite: spatial awesome built on SQLite. I love it because I don’t need to play DBA.
- QGIS: for maps
- ogr: for file format futzing
- proj: for scrupulously correct (well, if I knew what I was doing …) conversion between projected and otherwise.
- OpenOffice: for those tedious calculations
- … and about 20 years of unix experience to mash all the results together.
All of the above are free. I’m doing this because I want to learn. Asking elsewhere hasn’t turned up anything useful.