Great Circle Bearing Freeware

Hi all,I have found a little stand-alone program that will take input of two points of Lat & Long, and cough-up the compass heading and the distance. Work in min/sec or decimal degrees. See results in miles or kilometers. It's a piece of Ham Radio software used for aiming HF Beams but it should work great for track laying, too!Here's how it's author, W4SM describes it:"This program calculates grid squares from latitudes and longitudes, the reverse, and calculates distances and headings from two sets of lat/long or grid squares. The program saves your home QTH information. Click on "DISTANCE" to convert from miles to kilometers. The new Ver 3.6 allows switching between "DD MM SS" and "DD.ddddd" for latitude and longitude. L-click twice on the home or destination boxes to switch between "DD MM SS" and "DD.dddd" formats for each box. L-click twice on the main frame to change both home and destination windows at the same time. This version also saves the format and "miles" or "kilometers" for the range. On starting the program or "Recall Home" these will be reset. Starting with Ver3.5, the program begins with the cursor on the Distination Grid box. Enter a value and hit "ENTER". Distance and heading will be instantly calculated. The Ver3.4 upgrade corrects a minor problem with grid squares near 30 second "boundary lines" in Ver3.3."http://www.cstone.net/~w4sm/ham1.htmlEnjoy!Mike
W5VKC

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RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, LawrenceKellie, Oct-30-02, 12:49 PM, (1) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, MikeA, Oct-30-02, 01:10 PM, (2) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, LawrenceKellie, Oct-30-02, 01:37 PM, (3) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, MikeA, Oct-30-02, 02:24 PM, (4) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, JMorris, Oct-30-02, 04:54 PM, (5) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, griffinmt, Oct-30-02, 07:18 PM, (6) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, MikeA, Oct-30-02, 08:16 PM, (7) RE: Great Circle Bearing Freeware, griffinmt, Oct-30-02, 08:54 PM, (8)

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What would be the application in route building?Lawrence

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>What would be the application in route building?
>
>Lawrence Lawrence, I have search long for something like this, and although it has some ancillary and un-necessary functions, this is how I use it:Instead of placing two markers, and fiddling with the planting of trees or something between them for visibility enroute from one to another as I lay track, I can do this:1. Plant a marker, note its Lat & Lon.2. Plant a second marker some distance away, not worrying about if I can "see" in in route editor.3. Enter the two sets of coorinates into the program, and lay track at the given compass heading, confident I will, in "x" miles or kilometers, come upon my second marker.I submit that as DEMs and prototypical coorinates become easier to do and more popular, something like this can and will prevent ripping up track that traveled 20 "straight" miles "blind."Little errors at one marker will translate to big ones down the road.Just trying to help. If you think it's an inappropriate post, I certainly understand if you wish to remove it, sir.--
Cheers,Mike

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>3. Enter the two sets of coorinates into the program, and
>lay track at the given compass heading, confident I will, in
>"x" miles or kilometers, come upon my second marker. Is there a way to enter that compass heading for a track in the RE? Lawrence

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>>3. Enter the two sets of coorinates into the program, and
>>lay track at the given compass heading, confident I will, in
>>"x" miles or kilometers, come upon my second marker.
>
>Is there a way to enter that compass heading for a track in
>the RE? If so, I haven't found it. Instead I just manually aligned the track to head out at as near to 50-degrees as I could, because some distance ahead at that bearing, is Marker #2, which, after several more hundred kilometers and a few more straight track pieces, should be in sight.I'm very new at this. If there's a quicker better way, I'm all eyes! --
Mike

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LAST EDITED ON Oct-30-02 AT 04:56 PM (EST)

I love the idea! Especially for laying that first piece of track which I generally want to be especially accurate.I vaguely remember reading that there is some way to set or at least read the direction of a track section in the .W file or .tdb file or something like that. This could help in laying that first track section--before anything else is attached to it, or help figure out the amount of direction change to apply through dynamic track to get things back where they belong in adding new track sections to a route. Am I remembering correctly? And would tampering with the .W or .tdb files be a little too much like playing with fire?Jim

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Mike,If you know the correct direction in degrees that the track should follow, then you can lay it like this:-Place the first piece approximately in the right direction and strarting point.
-Exit RE and locate the .W file that you just modified.
-With a UniCode editor, open the .W file and locate that new track piece (at the bottom most likely).
-You will see a parameter QDIRECTION with four values.
-Parameter 2 is actually the cosine of one half the angle.
-Parameter 4 is the sine of one half the angle.
-grab your handy calculator (or excel) divide the compass direction by 2 and get the sin and cos of it, stick it into the qdirection values (5 to 7 decimal places) and save it.
-Start RE and check the resulting piece of track.
-Lay out a few miles and see how close you came.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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>Mike,
>
>If you know the correct direction in degrees that the track
>should follow, then you can lay it like this:
>
(snip)Martyn, thanks so much for documenting an absolute method once the compass bearing is known. I salute you for that info.I'm just happy to have un-earthed a little free software engine that would discover that direction in degrees to the next waypoint. GPS units do it but I've not found a bit of Windows software to do it except for this one and as you see, the latest revision added the decimal degree option. I loved it, and thought it was a discovery worth sharing.Even after the first piece of track, I like it just to know "which way" I am *supposed* to be headed (especially when "shift-flying in RE") and the terrain is just a void. I have at times become so hopelessly lost in the vast green desert I needed to "Jump" back to a friendly place and head out again. With DEM'd terrain and automatically placed markers, it's nice (and fun) to scout ahead into the bleak wilderness just to see what track challenges await. Thanks!--
Mike

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I can't take credit for 'figuring out' that info. It comes from a number of folks who have spent a deal of time studying the numbers. And they had the foresight to remember what they learned and willingness to share with all of us, however obscure it may have seemed to most of us at one time.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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