Navigating Street Atlas USA

The first thing that you notice about Street Atlas USA is that it doesn’t use a familiar Windows, menu-based user interface. DeLorme uses a unique user interface with its mapping programs; after you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to use. I walk you through the user interface and then show you how to move around inside a map.
Be sure to quickly browse through the PDF help file that comes with Street Atlas USA, which you can access by clicking the HELP button at the top of the window. Street Atlas USA has a rich set of commands, often offering you several different ways to perform a single task or operation.

Discovering Street Atlas USA Features

Like other street navigation software, Street Atlas USA displays road maps of the United States, finds addresses, and creates routes between two or more points. Check out a few other program features that are important to know about.

• POIs: All street navigation programs contain extensive databases of POIs. POIs refer to Points of Interest, not to Hawaiian side dishes made from taro root. POIs include restaurants (some of which might serve poi), hotels, parks, gas stations, and other locations you might be interested in while traveling. Street Atlas USA has a POI database that contains over four million businesses, services, and organizations.
• Voice support: If you’re using a laptop and GPS receiver as part of a car navigation system, Street Atlas USA can give you voice instructions when you need to turn to reach your destination. You can also use a voice recognition feature to give Street Atlas USA commands instead of using a keyboard or mouse.
• Routable roads: A big issue that all map companies face is ensuring that their road data is accurate, which can be very challenging considering the number of new roads that are built every year. Street Atlas USA has a feature that allows you to draw in roads that are missing on a map. After you create a road, Street Atlas USA can use it when calculating routes.
• Customizable maps: Street Atlas USA has an extensive collection of drawing tools for customizing maps with symbols, shapes, and text annotations. Street Atlas USA has many more features than I can cover in the space of this chapter (such as measuring distances and trip planning that takes fuel consumption as well as the number of hours spent driving into consideration).

To find out more about all the program’s features, visit www.delorme.com. Street Atlas USA comes on two CD-ROMs: one with the installation program and files, and the other with map data files. By default, you need to insert the map data CD-ROM each time you use the program. If you have enough space, you can copy the map data files to your hard drive; see the online Help for instructions.

Using DeLorme Street Atlas USA

In the pre-PC days, taking a trip across town, a state, or the country to visit someplace you’d never been before often involved planning worthy of a major expedition. You’d have to carefully check maps, trying to figure out the shortest and fastest routes, guessing when and where you’d need to stop for gas, scribbling down notes, and highlighting roads on paper maps. That’s all changed with inexpensive and easy-to-use street navigation software. Just run a program on your PC and enter the address of your starting point and the final destination. Then, a few mouse clicks later, you’ve got both a map and exact turn-by-turn directions for how to get from Point A to Point B. And as an added bonus, if you have a laptop and GPS receiver, you can take this software on the road with you, track your location in real-time, and get helpful hints in reaching your destination. (Most street navigation programs also have versions that run on PDAs for ultimate portability.) Several street navigation software packages are on the market that can keep you from getting lost. They all generally work the same, with the primary differences in the user interface and support of advanced features. If you’ve never used a street navigation program before, this chapter gets you moving in the right direction. I focus on DeLorme’s Street Atlas USA, showing you its basic features and how to use them.

Converting coordinates using online conversion utilities

If you don’t need to convert coordinates on a regular basis, you can save some hard drive space by using a Web-based coordinate conversion utility instead of installing GeoTrans. Most conversion sites are pretty straightforward to use; just enter the coordinate values that you want to convert and click a button. These sites are a few of the most popular:

• For simple datum, latitude and longitude, and UTM coordinate conversions: http://jeeep.com/details/coord
• For latitude and longitude, UTM, and Township and Range conversions:nwww.esg.montana.edu/gl
• For advanced online and standalone conversion tools, visit the U.S. National Geodetic Survey: www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS

Understanding Graphical Locator

The Environmental Statistics Group at Montana State University hosts a very powerful online tool called the Graphical Locator. It’s a cross between a gazetteer and a coordinate utility converter. Some of its features are

• A map of the United States that shows coordinate information when you click a location. You can zoom in on regional and state maps. (The maps only show geographic features, not feature names.)
• Coordinate conversion utilities for latitude and longitude, UTM, and township, range, and section.
• Extensive information on selected locations, including latitude and longitude; township, range, and section; UTM; elevation; state and country; nearest named features and distances; and USGS 7.5 minute topographic map name.

The Graphical Locater is designed to work with locations within the United States. It’s fairly easy to use; its author, D.L. Gustafson, has extensive online documentation on the utility. I use the Graphical Locator for quickly getting rough latitude and longitude coordinates of a location. Because there are no place names on the online maps, I consult a paper map with place names to zero in where I want to get location information if I’m unfamiliar with the terrain.
To check out the Graphical Locator, visit www.esg.montana.edu/gl.

Using GeoTrans to Convert Coordinate

GeoTrans is a popular, free Windows program developed by the Department of Defense (DoD). You can convert coordinates from many coordinate systems and datums. GeoTrans is available for download at http://earth-info.nima.mil/GandG/geotrans/geotrans.
htm.
Follow these steps to convert between coordinate systems with GeoTrans:

1. Select the map datum used with the coordinates from the drop-down
Datum list.

2. Select the coordinate system from the drop-down list below the datum.
Use Geodetic if you’re converting from latitude and longitude.

3. Enter the coordinates in the appropriate text boxes.

• If you’ve converting from latitude and longitude, enter the coordinates.
• If you’re converting from UTM, enter the Zone, Hemisphere, Northing, and Easting.

4. In the lower part of the window, select the datum and the coordinate system that you want to convert to.

5. Click the Convert Upper→Lower button.
The converted coordinates appear in the lower part of the window.
GeoTrans’ Help file covers these advanced features if you need them:

• Converting datums used in foreign countries
• Determining distance errors when converting between maps and scales

Advanced GNS Searches

For GNS advanced searches, you can enter an extensive list of feature types as part of your search criteria. These include oil pipelines, refugee camps, and vegetation types. Other options limit searches by the latitude and longitude boundaries of a rectangle, use special character sets from foreign languages, and use government and military codes as part of the search. If you want to run these advanced searches, the GNS Web site has links with explanations. If GNS finds records that match your search criteria, the features appear on a new page. A number of pieces of information are. For the average civilian user, the most useful data includes

• Name of the feature.
• Region of the world where the feature is located. Click the link to get an explanation of the abbreviation.
• Designation: The feature type (such as populated locality, farm, or reservoir). Click the link to get the definition of the abbreviation.
• Latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Area: Country and state or province information for the feature. Click the link for the meaning of the code.

You can also download tab-delimited text files from the GNS Web site for any country that contain features and information. This data can easily be imported into spreadsheets and databases.