I have released my final collection of Maidenhead Grid Squares in ESRI Shapefile (.SHP) format.

Two and Four character grids can be found here.  There is also the ability to drill down at that location to download specific four character grid files based on the four character prefix (useful in EmComm and Search and Rescue overlays) with six character resolution.

A collection of all the four character grid files is located here.  Keep in mind, it's big at over 350MB compressed and there are 32,400 files in the archive.  It is arranged in a directory structure such that you can drill down by grid square to get to the individual files.  Each grid square file is subdivied to the sixth character.  For example, the AA00.SHP file is subdivided into and labeled AA00aa, etc.

 I have tested these files in Xastir, PostGIS and qGIS and they have worked flawlessly.  I highly recommend qGIS if you want to make your own maps.  You can import a world base map, overlay it with grid squares and plot contacts.

As always, if you have questions, please let me know through the contact page at www.n1ics.net 

As promised, I've made available sub-grid shape (.SHP) files for each of the 32,400 grid squares.  These can be found at http://www.n1ics.net/node/15 under Maidnehead shape files.

They are organized in a tree based on the first 4 characters of the grid square, for easy browsing and download.

I have created a SourceForge project to host the entire collection of shape files.  I will announce the URL for that once it is approved.

73's de N1ICS

I've been hunting around and either I'm a dunce or it doesn't exist out there.  What I was looking for was a shapefile formatted Maidenhead grid map to overlay in things like Xastir and UMN mapserver.  Having found none, I wrote a script to generate a shapefile.

You can find the archive at

 http://www.n1ics.net/fileshare/files/15/Maidenhead_Shape_Files/MH4.tar.gz

It includes the .shp, .shx and .dbf files as well as a .dbfawk file for pulling out the gridsquare name.

I made a couple of assumptions:

   1.   A 4 digit locater was good enough for now.
   2.  The origin of the square is the lower left corner of the square (in the N Hemisphere).  Couldn't find anything to say yea or nay, so I went that route and my QTH shows up in the right square, as well as the mouse pointer showing the right square correlation in status line.

So, I invite you to download it and have fun with it.  I put it as a map overlay.  You can change the line colors (currently orange, since that shows up well over the weather radar in the snowstorm we're getting right now) in the dbfawk file by following directions from the Xastir Wiki at http://www.xastir.org/wiki/index.php/HowTo:DBFAWK

As always, looking for comments or suggestions.

Since I'm looking at a long weekend with a lot of blowing snow, the final project is to generate 6 digit maps, each as a collection of the 4 files in an archive per grid square.  That way you don't have to download the entire world at the higher precision (that and the libraries I use in the script blow up trying to make that one file, which would be enormous anyways).  So for example, you would pull down the EN70.tar.gz file for 6 digit grids for EN70.  Don't know if you're that interested in it, but it may be useful for SAR.

73's de N1ICS

A feed which does server-side filtering to limit APRS stations to the approximate boundaries of Allen County (OH) has been added to aprs.n1ics.net. It can be found on port 14582.

As demand warrants, other counties may be added.

A feed which does server-side filtering to limit APRS stations to the approximate boundaries of Van Wert County has been added to aprs.n1ics.net. It can be found on port 14581.

As demand warrants, other counties may be added.

Because of the large amount of work I do with APRS, I've elected to bring up an APRS server for my local systems to peer with.

Feeds are available as follows:

TCP port 10152: Full feed (unfiltered)
TCP port 14580: Full feed (user specified filters)
TCP port 1314: Message only feed

This server is experimental and peers with the four intermediate APRS servers that compose rotate.aprs.net

System status is available here.