Little did we know but it seems that our office wobbles. At least, it wobbles according to the latest version of Microsoft MapPoint 2006 with GPS Locator.
We’ve been big fans of MapPoint since its first release and this version adds some valuable features.
That said, there’s one huge problem that Microsoft hasn’t fixed: While the company boasts “Completely Refreshed Data,” when you try to find our house it still is identified in the wrong place. We had a telephone conference with the MapPoint guys some months ago and they said they’d get it fixed, but of course they didn’t. And yes, the world does indeed revolve around us.
What is really cool about MapPoint 2006 is the new GPS feature. With the use of any NMEA 2.0-compliant GPS receiver (or the one that comes in Microsoft’s bundled package) MapPoint can show your current location, speed and traveling direction. This data is combined with your currently defined route and, under Windows XP, MapPoint can provide voice-prompted driving directions.
Anyway, it was through the GPS features that we discovered that our office wobbles. We fired up the bundled USB-interfaced GPS just after we installed the software and went off to lunch.
When we got back there was a blue smudge on the map at our location under the GPS tracker symbol (a red bull’s-eye) that we at first thought must be a bug. Then we realized that what we were looking at was the cumulative error of our measured position.
The GPS system has inherent precision and accuracy limitations that are dependent on the precision of the system’s knowledge of the GPS satellite locations, the precision of determining the distance from those satellites and other factors.
For in-depth discussions of GPS accuracy see “David L. Wilson’s GPS Accuracy Web Page” and “GPS Errors & Estimating Your Receiver’s Accuracy.”
Where you are, what equipment you are using and when you are using it all conspire to make any GPS positional measurements inexact to some degree.
Thus it was that with the GPS receiver lying on the desk its GPS-determined location varied over time within a circle roughly 102 feet in diameter.
Anyway, MapPoint 2006 also includes a new Location Finder that doesn’t need a GPS device. Using your PC’s Wi-Fi connection in conjunction with a database of known Wi-Fi access points, the Location Finder can identify where you are. There’s also a new map display style for low-light conditions.
One complaint we have had about MapPoint since its first release was that we couldn’t figure out how to get the program to start up with a specific map because MapPoint doesn’t support any command line options or any configuration settings that allow you to specify the default map.
Today we stumbled across the solution in a forum on www.gpspassion.com: First you open the map you want to have loaded as the default after starting MapPoint. Under the “File” menu you select “Save As” and then browse to “Program FilesMicrosoft MapPointTemplates.” You then save the map as “New North American Map.stt” selecting “Map Template” from “Save as type” field. Now click “Save” and voilá! That map and any route defined on it has now become your default.
We found the solution in a forum posting about Microsoft Streets and Trips (Streets and Trips is really a stripped down version of MapPoint and lacks data analysis features) except that the directory to save “New North American Map.stt” in is “Program FilesMicrosoft Streets and TripsTemplates.” We figured that the same would apply under MapPoint. To our surprise we were right.
More MapPoint and mapping stuff next week.
Direct your thoughts to gearhead@gibbs.com or on Gibbsblog.
