MAPS100K.txt FINAL NOTES ON BUILDING 100K MAPS The MK100k2a.exe program written by KB4XF, Jack Cavanagh, has made it possible for anyone with the $32 USGS CD ROM (optional format!) for their area to make street level maps. See my MAPS-CD.txt file and the details in MK100k2a.txt. The program will even make up to 9 maps at a time. But this IS ONLY THE BEGINNING TO MAKING A USEFUL APRS MAP SYSTEM. The problem is that the small 1 mile maps will not be selected by APRS until you zoom below the 1 mile range unless you just happen to hit the exact center of the map. If you are on the border between two maps, you will NEVER see the maps, because APRS cannot find in the maplist, a map which can completely contain your screen. This is frustrating to users to have the detail more or less done, but to not be able to access it in a seamless manner. This file describes what I do to build a seamless map system. There are sort of two approaches, but a mix of the two is probably the best. BRUTE FORCE: This method takes the existing grid of adjacent 1 mile maps and creates a completely new grid of 1 mile maps whose centers are at the CORNERS of the original grid of maps. The process uses MAPFIX and the alt-IMPORT command to import streets from adjacent maps into each of these new maps. This covers the corners of the original grid, but you still have no overlap at the top and bottom centers of the original grids. This requires yet another grid offset by 1/2 mile up and down. (There is plenty of left/right overlap built into the original maps due to the horizontal aspect ratio used by MKMAPHK.) This process will result in trippling the original number of maps... JOINING SMALLER MAPS: This method looks for adjacent maps that are relatively small (7 to 15K) that can be combined with others and still stay below the 30 k limit. Because MKMAPHK makes maps of the same aspect ratio as the PC screen, the optimum joining of maps to give a larger map with the same aspect ratio is to combine four in a quad. Around the edges of your area, you can also combine maps vertically and horizontally. Then move the center and range of this combined map further outside of the area so that the white box does border the combined maps perfectly. I have combined as many as 4 horizontal 1 mile maps into a big 4 mile map centered 2 miles north of town. Similarly I make a 4 mile map to the south and east and west. Although most of these map areas are blank, the 4 combined 1 mile maps do show up now at the 4 mile range when your cursor is "north" of town. This always works around the edge of your city or town, because all of the maps generated in these areas have significantly fewer points. In the center of a city or town, this will rarely work because of the density of detail. But you may be able to still join at least two adjacent maps. ALthough the resulting 2 mile map will have lots of blank space at the edges, this central map may be listed first in the MAPLIST, so that other laps will cover those areas when the user ZOOMS. Whenever you use a map with large blank areas, always be sure that the maps that fill in those areas are listed LATER in the maplist. OVERLAING INTO A BIGGERMAP: MKMAPHK can make 4 and 8 mile maps, but it automatically leaves out most of the finer detail. If your 4 or 8 mile map has room, use the ctrl-OVERLAY feature in MAPFIX to temporarily overlay each of the 1 mile maps to look for any gray level main thoroughfares that need to be drawn into the bigger maps. Look for winding roads or long straight ones that locals will recognize. Use the alt-NEW and alt-ADD commands to rapidly draw in these streets. Do not worry about getting EVERY point, just a good approximation of these thoroughfares, since this larger map will only be visible at the larger scale. The exact detail will appear as the user zooms in. Only a few of these thoroughfares are needed to give the user the visual structure of sub-divisions and known landmarks. All of these methods use either the IMPORT or the OVERLAY feature of MAPFIX. Actually these two commands are really the same routine. The IMPORT brings points INTO the current map under construction, whereas the OVERLAY only draws them on the existing screen so you can SEE the points temporarily. This is so you can add more features to your working map by drawing over selected features in the OVERLAYED map (without having to IMPORT them ALL). Once you have given the file name for either command, you can re-use the same map over and over again with a single keystroke. This is particularly valuable with the Overlay command. To control the points that you want to IMPORT, the WHITE box representing the map CENTER and RANGE is a very powerful tool. The IMPORT function will ONLY import points that will fit INSIDE the white BOX where ever it is. You may move the box edges around anywhere you want with the alt-CENTER and alt-RANGE command. When building a combined map by IMPORTING adjacent horizontal maps, there will usually be significant horizontal overlap. To avoid the waste of this duplication here is the process I use. 1) Load the first map 2) ^OVERLAY the next map to see where it is going to fall 3) Use alt-C and alt-R to move the white box so that one of its edges makes a clean line just inside the existing map edge 4) Now hit alt-IMPORT and the second map comes in just up to the white line with minimal overlap. Now there will only be a few streets that duplicate and they can be removed using the FIND and DELETE commands. SUMMARY: Once you have finished generating your original 100k map grid, and can see the general density of the streets throughout the city or town, you can use the above techniques to build your maps into a seamless system of maps that in most cases is transparent to the user. This probably takes as long or longer than the original MKMAPHK process, but it is ESSENTIAL for user satisfaction. As an example, I took the 12 maps generated by KE4EER for Hattiesburg and was able to combine them into only 4 maps. A northern and southern 4 mile map, and two middle east and middle west 2 mile maps. This combined with the major street thoroughfares that I overlayed into his original 8 mile map makes a pretty good seamless map system.