Apologies to addicts of GPS/PDA/Smartphone mapping if this is obvious or old hat, but I was able to help a correspondent of mine recently in a quite unexpected way (I don’t own any GPS or mobile mapping devices at all but I’m really into mapping on a PC). It may be interesting to others in the same predicament.
He set out on a walking holiday and was dismayed to find that he hadn’t brought the required maps. Time was of the essence and there was no question of obtaining them at the destination. Then he had an idea, albeit a very long shot he thought:- knowing that I run Memory-Map (MM), and suspecting that I monitor my computers pretty much all the time when not out backpacking (I do), he sent me an email with the approximate grid references of the top-left and bottom-right corners of the map areas covering his intended walks. The idea was that I could extract just those map areas in the MM software and return them as email attachments, where the MM application running on his Smartphone could load them.
I picked up the email within minutes of its dispatch and I must say I was sceptical at first: the process seemed too easy for what he was planning and would surely fail at one end or the other.
The method he specified was to use the MM menu command: Mobile Device — Send Visible Map Portion… to create the map file on hard disk. It was a non-starter: on my MM installation, most of the commands on that menu are dimmed and unavailable, presumably because I have no mobile device set up or because the Microsoft ActiveSync service is disabled.
Thinking about it for a few minutes, I was sure MM must have the required capability even without a mobile device or service connected. Mobiles often have SD cards for extensible storage and we may want to write map sections directly on those. I remembered a technique whereby a closed route is drawn around a map area, enabling it to be digitally extracted, and I soon found the method:- right-click the route — Operations — Send enclosed map to Mobile Device…. This context command was enabled, and the resulting dialog gave the option to save to ‘Storage card on PC’. In fact it’s a standard Save dialog and you can save the map file anywhere.
Half the battle won!. Actually I suspected less than half: the real problems were more likely to be in software at his end. I emailed the map files one at a time and sure enough, a while later he reported that the maps had been received and successfully loaded onto the Smartphone. Now that did surprise me. I was expecting MM to stonewall us at his end, but not so, I could freely send him my map sections.
So there it is, a satisfying, if not entirely comprehensible (to me), success.
8 Comments
Genius!
It felt like an achievement at the time: imagine being out in the wilds without a readable map for any reason and just getting one emailed to you. I just hope I don’t become a Dial-a Map service.
How interesting! And if you draw an irregular polygon route you get correspondingly irregularly shaped map.
John,
Yes, any shape can be extracted. I foresee a possible emergency use on the TGOC.
Geoff, I only discovered this by chance (although I think it is in the docs somewhere) when looking on forums for something else. It is also very useful if you have a very large MM map which sometimes fail on a PDA/phone (I think 400mb is about max, but I find 200 is more foolproof). Not forgetting that the route can be bigger than your screen. I have used your 50k grid map to create a route around the standard OS 50k maps, then go into the higher scale map and extract just that section and name the file accordingly.
- It seems to me that the extracted map is bigger than you would expect compared to the original. It also creates the matching mmi and qed files.
- You still need the “matching” MM version software on the PDA.
Keep up the good work
Jim O
Jim,
The really surprising thing was that I could email my maps to someone else. Evidently there is no check on ownership in the SmartPhone app. I’m not sure about the PDA app, I think this process might fail - I guess we would have to try suck it and see.
I vaguely remember that when Windows Mobile 6 was released, the maximum map size transferrable to the device decreased.
Not sure if this is the place to post, but I’ve recently downloaded ‘MM Tracker’(full version) onto my Android smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S2) and it’s an excellent APP. You just have to copy your own MM files onto the phones SD card from your PC, and thought others may like to know about it.
MM Tracker - http://sites.google.com/site/mmtrackerinfo/
David,
Ah yes, I remember the MM Tracker App. I believe its author had a right barney with Apple and MM when they withdrew MM Tracker from the App Store, probably (we think) at the behest of MM. That’s one of the main reasons why I fiercely oppose the Apple setup and all others following the same model.
I posted on a blog a while ago expressing my dismay that so many people were sleepwalking into this insidious model whereby you don’t own anything, but it seems nobody is listening.