[Xastir] v 1.5.1 and hacked gpsd 2.23 - and a question

Curt, WE7U archer at eskimo.com
Wed Jun 8 11:37:56 EDT 2005


On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Richard Polivka wrote:

> I am running Tiger 2004 shapefiles
> and I appear to have a consistent offset of a few
> hundreths of a degree. Is there a way of programming
> in a fixed map offset to minimize the route errors,
> both N/S and E/W?

Nope.  About the only answer we can give is that the Tiger data is
not intended for this type of usage, but only for census data
collection.  Of course their data is a free source of street maps so
it is getting used in ways that were unintended by the census folks.

The offset varies in different areas.  They are working on making
this situation better, but I'm not sure we'll see accurate maps from
them within the next 5 or 10 years, if ever.  It's really not in
their charter, and the people collecting the data are really not
trained properly to do so.  I've seen Gerry talk about this before
and I was amazed at just how unprepared these people were to be
collecting geographic data.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"



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