[NTLUG:Discuss] GPS Mapping Software

[Steve Baker]

Kyle Davenport wrote:
> *** Authentication Certificate ***
> 
> Rick Cook wrote:
> 
>>I am looking for a way to take the mapping information on the
>>laptop and use it to create a detailed map
> 
> 
> wow, I've been looking for this too.  I assumed at this late stage of the
> game there would be numerous free sources of maps and waypoints.  Instead I
> find all the "rich" detail buried in proprietary and expensive formats that
> the open-source community hasn't cracked yet.  Geez, it reminds me of
> office software in 1995 [shudder].

There is one source of clean, free, public mapping information that was
gathered by the US goverment for census-taking purposes in 2000.  It hasn't
been updated since - but one presumes it will be since it's required for
census-taking.

It's called 'TIGER':

   http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrcd108/tgr108cd.html
   http://arcdata.esri.com/data/tiger2000/tiger_download.cfm

It's fully documented and as far as I can tell, it's fairly complete
for things that were there in 2000.

I've written crude programs to extract the road data for some small area
and display them as vector data on a Linux PC.  You are welcome to copies
of those if you think they'll help...but they aren't in a state where I'd
say they were useful for much as-is.

There is a lot of other data there too.

However, it's not clear how you'd get it from the TIGER format into
whatever format your GPS uses.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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