[aprssig] Some obscure APRS client questions

[Keith VE7GDH]

Bob W9RXR wrote...

> That would work for a handful of objects, but not for the dozens of 
> objects I might want to bring in as an overlay file. For example, I 
> recently worked a marathon event that had 26 mile markers and about 
> 18 aid stations. I had those locations plotted out on a map, but not 
> in a format that UI-View nor APRSIS/32 understood.

26 mile markers plus 18 aid stations... that's only 44 positions. I don't
think I could knock it off in half an hour, but I'm sure it could be done
in less than hour. Yes, that's an hour of your time, but if it's a marathon
that will be run every year, you could re-use the information every
year.

How would I do it? Yes, I could manually enter the information from
scratch in a text editor in the right format, but that would be a bit more
work. An easy way to accomplish the task for anyone using UI-View
would be to fire up the add-on UI-InfoKiosk and merely click on the
map at each of the locations and type in a name and a description.
This would probably take 30-40 minutes and then save a copy
of the file that contains the objects just entered as some filename.pos
in the Overlays folder and spend perhaps 5-10 minutes fixing it up
with a text editor. Given that you would be repeating the same actions
over and over again, it might be a lot faster than I speculated.

Open the overlay file in UI-View and zoom in close enough that you
can check the accuracy. This step wouldn't be necessary if you were
zoomed in enough when the objects were first created in UI-InfoKiosk
but it wouldn't hurt to check. If no corrections are needed, you are done.
You could even send a copy of the file to anyone else that was involved.

> There is nothing trivial about manually and repetitively clicking and 
> filling out dialog boxes when I already have the data in .GPX or some
> other GPS or map program format.

Given that 44 locations were involved, I would consider an hour's time
to be a trivial task. However, you said that you already had the data in
GPX format. It would be trivial to open it in something like Garmin's
Mapsource and saving the waypoints as a text file. I would think that
half an hour with a text editor would give you a POS file ready to use
in UI-View or any other APRS client that was capable of using the file.

73 es cul - Keith VE7GDH
--
"I may be lost, but I know exactly where I am!"