There are a variety of web sites which provide listings of useful gps links. Here are some that I have found. I don't quite know how to list them so I have used descriptions that were important to me when I visited them.
MapGen software and other gps information.
One of the best places on the net that I have found to access information about GPS is a page maintained by Peter Bennett. This page contains links to hardware and software reviews, academic articles on gps, information about Garmin gps, NMEA protocols, and many other items of interest. Peter's page also contains links to a number of "homebrew" designs for external antenna's for GPS. There is also a link to a page where you can purchase homemade Garmin connectors!
This page contains links to software programs which I have downloaded and tested, including:
I have found FlexGPS, WinGPS , and Waypoint+ to be the most useful.
FlexGPS is a simple 16-bit windows program which runs under Win 3.11, Win 95, or NT 4.0 that can display and register a map (bmp file) on the screen and, using NMEA protocol, download your present position from the gps and display it on the map. The program also supports limited GRMN data transfer protocols which allow you to upload/download waypoints, tracks, and routes to the Garmin gps. Using the mouse you can create waypoints on the screen. Waypoints, tracks, and routes may be stored/retrieved from disk or the gps unit. Data are stored as ASCII files, but not in a form convenient for loading into Excel.
WinGPS is a slightly more powerful program which does much of the same things as does FlexGPS. There are separate 16- and 32-bit versions. It supports a wider range of bitmat formats (GIF, JPG, etc.) and appears to be slightly more powerful in its ability to manipulate data. It uses NMEA protocols to monitor your present position. The main limitation of this program, from my perspective, is that it does not support the Garmin protocols to upload/download waypoints. Thus, its communication with the gps unit is very limited. The author of WinGPS suggests that scanned maps be limited to 16-color (8-bit) and have no more than 50-100 dpi resolution.
Waypoint+ does not have the charting capabilities of the other two programs. It is a companion program that may be used to manage waypoints, routes, and tracks, apparently written specifically to work with DeLorme Street Atlas or Map Expert software packages. It uploads/download these using the garmin protocol and stores them to disk in a variety of formats, including an ASCII format that works well with Excel. I have found this particularly useful in that I can transfer the waypoints from the gps to the computer, import them into Excel where I type in a message field for each waypoint, then transfer them back to the gps.
Rather than scan in loads of maps, which would first require that I obtain paper copies of good maps, I have decided to search for digitized maps on the web. This has raised a number of new problems. There are two kinds of maps: 1) raster maps, which are essentially scanned pictures of paper maps in bmp, gif, or jpg format, and 2) vector maps. A vector map is essentially a database which contains all relevent information to create the map. The database may be stored in any format and must be used in conjunction with a special program for generating the map image from the data. In the GPS world there are various software packages used for this purpose. Raster maps are quick to display, but require lots of disk space. Furthermore, they do not lend themselves to zooming in and out. Vector maps are ideal for minimizing the disk space necessary to store the map and, with appropriate software, are perfect for zooming in and out. A good paper map may be readily turned into a raster map with a scanner; the resulting image may be manipulated with a variety of standard windows programs. It is much more work to turn a good paper map into a vector map - all the fine detail must be digitized and entered into the database.
A variety of sites are available which will generate a highway map for a selected location. I find these frustrating in that they are very slow to access the map (even with a fast internet connection), and when it is finally generated, it is not in a form which may be downloaded to my pc (for use with my charting program). MapQuest is one of the many sites for this.
The National Oceanic … Administration has various collections of maps of shorelines available on the web. These data are not intended for navigation. They are 70,000:1 resolution, which is about half the resolution of a NOAA chart. The medium resolution coastline data may be found at various sites. Here are a three:
Original NOAA site - this is the FTP site which contains the NOAA data in the three formats: 1) *.tar files for use with ArcView, 2) *.bna and 3) *.gen files. The last two are ASCII format which are linked to other files which provide descriptive information. I gather that the TAR files are some kind of compressed files (like ZIP) but I have not been able to figure out how to uncompress them.
Coastline Extractor - this site can extract ASCII (zip or not) files of latitude/longitude pairs for any range selected. This utility can draw from the NOAA coastline data above or from several other databases. The ascii files are in the MapGen format (whatever this is - a standard I should learn more about, I am guessing).
individual files - this is a collection of zip files corresponding to the various regions. I have downloaded the one for the great lakes and unzipped it. It appears to contain data in a binary format, along with an ascii file which describes the format. I am not sure how to read this data.
I have located (but not tried) several programs which convert the above data into different formats. These are described below.
File Conversions may be found at this URL. In particular, there are various programs for converting the NOAA medium resolution shoreline data files to other formats.
I found the above site through this one, which also lists additional translators.
Here is another list of translators.
Sol somebody has an ftp site with lots of good translation stuff.
As mentioned above, I have shareware that will display any map, including a nautical chart, from a BMP file format. NOAA nautical maps may be purchased already on CD-rom or disk. There are two popular formats. BSB is the company that has been liscensed by NOAA to produce raster images of their paper maps. They sell individual NOAA maps on a floppy disk for about $15 each or a collection of maps for a region (50 maps or so for Lake Erie, for instance) on a CD-rom for $200. These raster maps arrive in a *.kap format, not a *.bmp format. Thus, they are not immediately useful with the shareware navigation programs which support only BMP and GIF type images. Various commercial programs are available which make use of these charts, however - look for the "uses BSB style charts." I did find one navigation program, NavPak that comes with a program MapSetup.exe which reads *.kap files and converts them to *.bmp files. I have downloaded this software and used it to view a demo BSB file.
The competing, vector format charts are supplied by Navionics. I don't know other sofware that uses their format. Clearly vector formats hold great potential for the future, but it will be some time before vector maps are available at reasonable price with the kind of detail presently available with raster maps. Moreover, raster maps may be readily handled in a variety of formats using common Windows software. If money is no object, vector maps are the way to go. Since I am trying to do this on the cheap I will keep looking for shareware (preferably freeware) and free raster charts.
I found a Canadian site for Lake of the Woods which includes BMP charts for that area. I wish that I could find more such sites - seems to me there must be more, but I have not found them.
Here is a site which lists URLs for a variety of maps on the web. One of the sites includes on-line maps of the Great Lakes. Unfortunately they are not appropriate for navigation.
Apart from automobile and nautical maps, there is a growing academic field that makes heavy use of GIS and maps for environmental, urban planning, and geographical uses. This field uses several standard formats and software packages - I am having a hard time finding out what these are. One popular format is ArcView. I have been able to find a program ArcExplorer which I thought can display such files. So far I have not been successful.
Here is a list of several terms I have run accross. I hope to figure out what they are and make appropriate links soon.
ArcInfo
MapInfo
DXF - I discovered that Canvas 5.0 can read this file, and also write out a BMP file.
DGN
RTF - Canvas 5.0 can read an adobe version of this - don't know if it is the same.
MapGen (MIF)
Apparently much of the academic use of GPS has been done on UNIX systems. MapGen, for instance, is a standard plotting system that runs on UNIX. The UNIX software is free at various ftp sites. Apparently there are versions available for Windows, but these would appear to be commercial.
In an attempt to learn about these I have visited the Virtual Earth, a hyperlink tour of the web for geophysicists. One of the sites I found was an introduction to ArcInfo. ORES is a site which has links to various GIS software and data. Included on this page are MapGen, MOS-PC GIS, and OSUMap software.
It occured to me that state highway departments might provide, free of charge, official highway maps. I found a site which listed a number of transporation URLs. One of these listed is the State of Ohio Department of Transportation. They provide for downloading any Ohio County map in a DGN format. This is the native format for the Bentley Systems Microstation CADD software, whatever that is. I have not yet been able to locate a program to translate this to another format. It appears, however, that other state DOT's use the same program and provide similar maps. This Ohio DOT site also has various city maps in GIF format.
My search has led me to the Geoscience Information Center. Another large site is here.
MapInfo is a big company
in this business.
Stomp's Navigation Links
USA GPS Waypoint Server
Mathematics of mapping
Calculator for finding distance between two points given latitude and longitudes
Another calculation, same thing, with background mathematics.
Simple description of latitude and longitude for novices.
Dr. Math's discussion of geometry and distance.