scocam

Anyone know what Peter Shipley used to create his maps on dis.org? For reference, the link to the maps is http://www.dis.org/wl/maps

I would really like to find a way to easily label each location fix with the network name or other information. It seems that it cannot easily be done in MapPoint. Any suggestions?


Thanks,
scocam


My current setup:
Vehicle: 02 Tahoe
Laptop: IBM Thinkpad
Apps: NetStumbler, MapPoint 2001
NIC: Orinoco Gold
GPS: Garmin Venture
Antenna: Homemade 8dbi Omni

sparafina

Mapblast - by vicinity.com, says on the maps

There a couple of MapPoint products, use the search function.

Some also use MS Streets and Atlas, and Garmins Mapsource.

I would also recommend MapMaker Gratis, which is a nice freeware cartographic package. It also has the added benefit of producing copyright free, unlike the other packages which use vendor proprietary data.

scocam

Yeah, I checked out MapBlast but was unable to find the simplicity in using it this way. There is also a limit of 65 (or so) lat/long point that it will accept.

I've tried Microsoft's Streets and Atlas and it's more cumbersome than that of it's big brother, MapPoint.

I have yet to look at MapMaker Gratis. I'll check that out now.


Thanks for your suggestions,
scocam

sparafina

Since you have mappoint, try StumVerter or MapPoint Toolbox

AustinDotCom

Check out Radio Mobile, a mapping tool designed for wireless.

It imports USGS data for elevations, mapblast data for streets,
and has all of the predictive math needed to plan your links. It will plot an elevation view of your fresnel zones while showing how much of your zone is missing. Very cool for the wireless planner. Handles all frequencies, handles all parameters such as cable loss, receive threshold, antenna gain, etc.

And as a bonus, I figured out how to import netstumbler data!
There is a cities.dat file which is simply lon and lat for cities with the city name and font color and position. I took my netstumbler output and reformatted it (using awk, grep, sort, vi and uniq) into a small set of samples, only one sample per lon/lat set. I then applied some font color based on signal level, and gave it a name according to the channel in use. I end up with maps that are very useful for plotting cell coverage and mapping interfering networks. Gives you a way to do spectrum management for a cell, planning for best results within the cell.

Of course it is also usable as a general mapping tool. It is not as pretty as some of the maps, but is very useful for someone managing a public access wireless network.

Formatting the data took a while since I used the wi-scan export data as the basis, throwing out about 3/4th of the data to make the resulting maps cleaner and more clear.

Download radio mobile at:
http://www.cplus.org/rmw/english1.html

Also, in case you don't already think Radio Mobile is the coolest free wireless mapping tool around, it's capabilities go farther...

If you hook your GPS to Radio Mobile, you can set it up to track your position, sending the position data to other machines running Radio Mobile. So for example, you could have a fleet of trucks, with wireless IP to the central office, and from the central office see where all of your trucks are in real time! If your network supports the multicast, all stations on the trucks and in the offices will all see the same real-time view.

So you can use it to plan a wireless data network, then track vehicles within it... if that's what you want to do. Of course you have to want to do that... We wanted to start up a web based delivery service using runners with GPS systems, and two-way
messaging. This would have been the thing you project on the wall to plot the locations of the delivery runners. But I digress...

MapPoint is great, but it costs money, and isn't really designed for engineering wireless networks. Radio Mobile is free, and is a nice tool for what it is. It is a little clunky in how you build the layers up of a map, and there is little documentation... but so what!

mentat

How about posting the script or a HOWTO for making the map you describe? I know a lot of people here are map freaks and it would be very much appriciated.

systemd0wn

ya, wow. that map program looks slick. i realy do like the look of it when its merged with a road map. Do you have any examples you could post for us to see?

__________________
Systemd0wn
'311 Transistor, its a lightning resistor'

AustinDotCom

Ok, processing the wi-scan file was done by hand.

I will need to explain each step, and the tools I used.
I'm a Unix guy, and the tools I used are fairly ugly from the non-unix point of view. I believe that all of these toold can be had for dos, it is just a matter of installing the commands on your windows machine and running them in a dos window (or get
a shell account on a buddy's linux machine...

I will post some details on what I did...

But for those in the audience that can jump to the end, here is the details of what made me discover this method... I really wanted to import data into the map program, it just didn't support the kind of import I wanted to do. I then stumbled across the cities.dat file, opened it up, and caught a major clue.

The cities.dat file looks like this...

0,43.96,-116.14,"Abagnar"
0,57.13,2.08,"Aberdeen"
0,5.32,4.04,"Abidjan"
0,16.89,99.89,"Acapulco"
0,5.53,.23,"Accra"
0,51.81,176.68,"Adak"
0,37,-35.29,"Adana"
0,9.02,-38.75,"Addisababa"
0,-34.94,-138.6,"Adelaide"

The netstumbler data looks like this:

N 30.2311060 W 97.4262070 ( hotworx ) BBS ( 00:40:96:41:c8:a1 ) 00:35:04 (GMT) [ 22 72 50 ]
N 30.2311060 W 97.4262070 ( WaveLAN Network ) BBS ( 00:02:2d:28:bb:3d ) 00:35:04 (GMT) [ 10 54 44 ]
N 30.2311060 W 97.4262070 ( hotworx ) BBS ( 00:40:96:41:c8:a1 ) 00:35:04 (GMT) [ 15 63 48 ]
N 30.2311060 W 97.4262070 ( WaveLAN Network ) BBS ( 00:02:2d:28:bb:3d ) 00:35:04 (GMT) [ 9 55 46 ]
N 30.2310150 W 97.4262680 ( WaveLAN Network ) BBS ( 00:02:2d:28:bb:3d ) 00:35:05 (GMT) [ 6 55 49 ]
N 30.2310150 W 97.4262680 ( hotworx ) BBS ( 00:40:96:41:c8:a1 ) 00:35:05 (GMT) [ 0 0 0 ]
N 30.2310150 W 97.4262680 ( WaveLAN Network ) BBS ( 00:02:2d:28:bb:3d ) 00:35:05 (GMT) [ 0 0 0 ]
N 30.2304050 W 97.4265310 ( tspeed ) BBS ( 00:40:96:30:b5:48 ) 00:35:17 (GMT) [ 8 56 48 ]

As you can see, extrracting the data from one file format and inserting it into the other isn't such a big deal.

Also, I noticed an alternate format for the cities.dat data near the end of the file I saw what must be the author's home town:

ff,45.3,73.25,"St Jean Sur Richelieu",0,0
ff00,45.3,73.25,"St Jean Sur Richelieu",1,ff
ff0000,45.3,73.25,"St Jean Sur Richelieu",2,ffff
ffff,45.3,73.25,"St Jean Sur Richelieu",3,ff0000
ff00ff,45.3,73.25,"St Jean Sur Richelieu",4,ff00


After pointing the map at those coordinates, I saw what these lines of data did on the map. The hex codes are colors, background and forground colors.

My mapping results were a complete hack, but the point was that I was able to do what I wanted with the netstumbler data, and I used my favorite free wireless mapping program to do it.

I will post more on the details of the file conversion. Someone out there reading this is going to turn this into a script, perhaps a CGI so it can be added to the map point conversion page.

One thing, before you mess up your cities.dat file, make a backup copy, and don't blame me if the mapping program blows up if fed bad data. I had zero problems, but as I know all too well, you only learn from mistakes, so there are probably gatchas to this that I was lucky and avoided.

Also, different subject... In the propagation prediction plots, Radio Mobile knows nothing about trees or buildings. One thing I want to do it merge in some mapquest sattelite photos so I can see the buildings, and perhaps the more obvious trees. But as a fudge factor, when I am plotting antenna patterns or looking at the visual coverage (line of sight) I always subtract the trees and houses from the mast height. So for example, if you are doing a roof to roof shot between two houses, and your antennas are just at treetop level, then you plug in 1 meter for the height, even if it is really 6 to 8 meters. This way you have artificially lowered the antennas to simulate the obstructions presented by the trees.

As a sanity check, I have a 7 mile radio link I ran in marginal conditions, and I was able to make it work. When I plotted the link using Radio Mobile, I discovered what I already knew, that I did not have line of sight for the hop. What we did when we ran the link is aimed not at the other end of the link, rather we aimed each end at the imaginary center of the part of the fresnel zone that was not blocked by the ground. So both ends of the link were 23db grids that were aimed several degrees above the horizon. The point is that I was guessing 7 years ago when I ran that shot, but radio mobile correctly predicted no line of signt, but did predict that enough fresnel was available for a signal. It dies not predict what purposely misaiming the antennas will do, but it does give a visual representation of the fresnel zone in a manner that might inspire one to aim high as we did. You hear about downtilt, but we never talk about uptilt to get over an obstruction. It was a local ham radio operator that was helping on the shot that suggested the uptilt after failing for 4 days to bring the link up... and of course it worked! Now, looking at that link really gives me a sense that Radio Mobile will be useful because of the fact it predicted the link was marginal but would work. The math is done for you, but you still have to know what it means so you know what numbers to plug in, there are dozens of variables. The thing that is missing is more comprehensive antenna simulations. It will simulate an omni, and a yagi, and a couple others that you don't normally encounter in the 2.4ghz band, but there are a half dozen other antenna types I would like to simulate, so the next step is to reverse engineer the antenna formulas and add swome new ones.

I'll post later with my recipie for the data conversion. Half of you may have already figured it out, it is not that difficult. Those of you that are not programmers will need some clues that hopefully I will be able to pass on in my next posting...


George