{"id":3119,"date":"2007-05-08T16:03:35","date_gmt":"2007-05-08T20:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/08\/proj-your-cryptic-geographic-friend\/"},"modified":"2008-03-26T11:39:57","modified_gmt":"2008-03-26T15:39:57","slug":"proj-your-cryptic-geographic-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/08\/proj-your-cryptic-geographic-friend\/","title":{"rendered":"proj: your cryptic geographic friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon<\/a>, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America.<\/p>\n

And then I discovered proj<\/a>. While it has a pretty hideous command-line syntax, the output matches Corpscon to the sixth decimal place. Say you had a waypoint stored (for Southern Ontario, UTM Zone 17, NAD83) like this:<\/p>\n

4843744 443025 Goderich<\/code><\/p>\n

that is, UTM northing,easting, followed by label.<\/p>\n

To convert this to geographic coordinates, you’d invoke invproj (which goes from UTM to geographic) like this:<\/p>\n

invproj -E -r -f \"%.6f\" +proj=utm +zone=17 +datum=NAD83<\/code><\/p>\n

and it would spit out:<\/p>\n

4843744 443025 -81.707611 43.744546 Goderich<\/code><\/p>\n

Columns 3 and 4 are the geographic coordinates – 43\u00c2\u00b0 44′ 40.37″ N, 81\u00c2\u00b0 42′ 27.40″ W<\/a> in more familiar notation – which is in fact a location between Brock St and Newgate St in Goderich, Ontario.<\/p>\n

With a Unix box, proj and gpsbabel<\/a>, I’m set for all my coordinate conversions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[504,454,455,506,505,507],"class_list":["post-3119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-corpscon","tag-gps","tag-gpsbabel","tag-gpx","tag-proj","tag-utm"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-Oj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}