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The Professional Gardener

Good graphics program for site mapping with a GPS

21 years ago

I'm trying to map out my farm using a handheld GPS...and I'm wondering if there's something out there that would be good for what I'm doing. I was thinking about just doing it on graph paper, but there's just someting too wrong with using (old fashioned) graph paper with (super-techie) GPS. Besides, I'm gonna need to be able to adjust coordinates to the average, since the GPS readings have a pretty serious "margin of error".

I'd like to be able to enter coordinates in as x/y and have them appear on a drawing.

I have a macintosh (OSX), but can also run linux. Don't want to spend much more than $1,000, considerably less if possible.

Thanks for any advice!

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Comments (2)

Rosa
21 years ago
What kind of GPS are you using?

I find that my margin of error for my cheapie Garmin unit is less than a meter and most times less than that.
Organic_johnny
Original Author
21 years ago
I've got a cheapie garmin unit too :). Usually it gives the same readings at the same spots, but in one case was off by 4 meters, so I have doubts about the accuracy. A meter or two wouldn't throw me too much, but 4 meters is enough to throw off acreage calculations!

Just out of curiosity Rosa, do you use it for mapping contract sites? I had thought I might eventually do that before finding the sampling-error problem.

Can any designers out there recommend a graphics program to use with the coordinates? When I was in college I used Canvas (version 2.x). Is that still a good program, or maybe too much? I don't have any use for 3-D rendering or anything like that.
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