Entering GPS without GPS Receiver

[quordandis]

Hi Everyone,

I have a question. I don't own a GPS receiver (anymore) but I DO have MS Streets and Trips 2004 which does give me Lat/Lon Coordinates with the N and W prefix instead of + and -.

Anyway, I also use NetStumbler on my WinXP machine with an internal orinocco mini-pci card. Is there any way I could use the lat/long coordinated in ms streets and trips to edit the summary file exported by netstumbler?

Any other suggestions are most welcome!

Thanks,
Quordandis

[izzy4505]

Latitudes North are +. For instance, N 40 deg is the same as +40. South are -. Similarly, Coords West are -, and east are +. For instance, if streets and trips gives you this:

N 41.567, W 89.543

Then you'll use this:
41,567, -89.543

Latitude values are north and south. Logitude values are east and west.


Now another thing they probably use for partial degrees is minutes and seconds, rather than decimal values.

So if you have this for a lat:
N 40d 30' 15'', this means 40 degrees, 30 minutes, and 15 seconds North. To figure this out in decimal coords, use this equation:

deg + (min/60) + (sec/(60^2))

You should get 40.5041666666 or something like that.

[quordandis]

Actually, that's not what I was asking. I know how the coordinates work, in fact, MS Streets and Trips 2004 give you the coordinates in N/S, E/W and in decimal, not DMS. However, here's my problem. If i'm wardriving, netstumbler would pick up a signal, and then I could just look up the actual address of the house that I'm near in MS Streets and Trips to get the coordinates to use as a reference for Netstumbler. However, if you've ever looked at an exported netstumbler summary, the coordinates come out as N and E and 0.00000. I wanted to know if I could just edit the file and change the coordinates to N and W and whatever the decimal values are that I get from MS Streets and Trips...is this an "ok" option?

Thanks,
Quordandis

[bobzilla]

There is a danger of data-entry error. But we get a lot of questionable data that we have to sift through already. I think after one trip of doing this you'll go get another gps, however. I've seen people doing address lookups for everything they find and it's horribly tedious. We do have geocoding now, but it sounds like you've got that end covered.

[quordandis]

Well, I can definitely understand data-error. I don't know if this is any help at all, since my knowledge of geocoding is pretty limited, but when I tested the accuracy of the Lat/Long coordinated on Streets and Trips against the GPS Receiver (at the time), they were pretty close. I noticed a difference on the 4th decimal place... X.YYYZ (Z being the difference in number)

--Quordandis