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County Line Crossings Locator |
County
Line Location Process
In this method, which was first developed and supported in CQ/X version 1.7.9.1 and is described in detail in the document Developing Crossing File Using Google Maps, the user performs the following steps with the objective of steps 1-4 being simply to obtain a file of latitude and longitude values describing the path taken by the route.
If
Streets and Trips was capable of exporting the lat/lon values for a
trip steps 2-4 would not be required, but unfortunately that capability
does not exist in current versions of S&T. Although
the above is a multi-step process each step is very simple
requiring only
moving and saving of files
with
the only additional requirement being the development of some skill at
using Google Maps and tweaking/editing
the map, as described in step 6, to make sure that the resulting path
goes where you plan to go. Here are screen shots of the CQ/X
dialogs
used in steps 5-6. In the first dialog you specify the file of lat/lon
values that define the path and specify the output file where the
crossings found are to be saved. During the calculation process the
most recent county line crossing found is shown in the status window to
indicate progress of the calculations. Once the process completes in
typically about 30 seconds, the first dialog is closed and the second
dialog showing the found crossings is opened. Buttons at the bottom
of that dialog provide
County
Line
Locator Demos
Here
are links to several demo
routes which have been analyzed
using the tool. These maps show the planned route, the counties
involved, the entry/exit points for each county, and the driving
distance across each county.
Dayton 2013 Demo-- Demo multi-state route from New Orleans, LA to Dayton, OH used in presentation to the County Hunter Forum at Dayton 2013 Hamvention. NO5W FQP 2013 Saturday-- Saturday route for NO5W in the 2013 Florida QSO Party. Orlando to Seattle-- Demo multi-state route from Orlando, FL to Seattle, WA. This extreme example, which involves finding about 125 crossings, takes 3 minutes on a Sony Vaio 2.67 GHz machine with 6 GB RAM. CTDXCC 2012 Demo-- Demo multi-state route from New Orleans, LA to Austin, TX for CTDXCC 2012. Copyright: C.W. Sanders, NO5W |