Global Positioning System

these programs are no longer maintained !! go for their successors to Gem

	Linking navigation with cartography
	GPS has had my interest from the early beginning. Both in my work and as a hobby I have played around with GPS units and tried to link them to computers in various ways and for various purposes. Find here the bits and pieces that could be useful for others too.

GPS for EarthMate . . . and others It all started when I needed maps to accompany a DeLorme EarthMate I had bought. Because I needed non-USA maps, I discovered that the only suitable digital maps are on-line maps on the Internet. So I developed a Win32 program that grabs those maps, stores them in a cache and then displays them later when on the road. Lateron I added to the program support for other types of GPS units like Garmins and those using the NMEA protocol. The result is a quite universal program that combines GPS navigation with on-line cartography.

Gem for PocketPC PDAs PocketGem is a port of Gem for the PocketPC platform. Because PDAs are much more mobile than notebook PCs, this port made much sense and opens a whole array of new possibilities. With an accompanying variant of Gem, you can prepare the right set of maps and then download them to the PDA, either by syncing or using a memory card.

Gem with Google Maps As an alternative for the MapQuest maps that Gem is based on, GoogleGem provides the same functionality as Gem, but is using Google's maps and aerial photos. For USA/Canada this provides a great alternative mapping resource, however for the rest of the world, Google's database is pretty empty.

JavaScript popup for GEM maps So you have collected a decent set of maps or aerial photos using Gem. And you would like to view them on another platform than Windows or even browse them from that web-server in the basement. For that purpose I created this JavaScript utility that allows you to diplay, zoom and pan your maps. It doesn't do any downloading of missing maps, it's just a dedicated image viewer.

  Willem van Schaik, Calgary, February 2007     http://www.schaik.com/wwwillem.html