[Xastir] Maidenhead Shape File

[Eric Germann]

Folks,

I've been hunting around and either I'm a dunce or it doesn't exist out 
there.  What I was looking for was a shapefile formatted MH grid map to 
overlay in things like Xastir and UMN mapserver.  Having found none, I 
wrote a script to generate a shapefile.

You can find the archive at

  http://www.n1ics.net/fileshare/files/15/Maidenhead_Shape_Files/MH4.tar.gz

It includes the .shp, .shx and .dbf files as well as a .dbfawk file for 
pulling out the gridsquare name.

I made a couple of assumptions:

    1.   A 4 digit locater was good enough for now.
    2.  The origin of the square is the lower left corner of the square 
(in the N Hemisphere).  Couldn't find anything to say yea or nay, so I 
went that route and my QTH shows up in the right square, as well as the 
mouse pointer showing the right square correlation in status line.

So, I invite you to download it and have fun with it.  I put it as a map 
overlay.  You can change the line colors (currently orange, since that 
shows up well over the weather radar in the snowstorm we're getting 
right now) in the dbfawk file by following directions from the Xastir 
Wiki at http://www.xastir.org/wiki/index.php/HowTo:DBFAWK

As always, looking for comments or suggestions.

Since I'm looking at a long weekend with a lot of blowing snow, the 
final project is to generate 6 digit maps, each as a collection of the 4 
files in an archive per grid square.  That way you don't have to 
download the entire world at the higher precision (that and the 
libraries I use in the script blow up trying to make that one file, 
which would be enormous anyways).  So for example, you would pull down 
the EN70.tar.gz file for 6 digit grids for EN70.  Don't know if you're 
that interested in it, but it may be useful for SAR.

73's de N1ICS

Eric