Township and Range Options

It is possible to change the appearance of the Township and Range grid. Quarter/Quarters can be hidden, grid colors changed, and label appearance modified. The options can be set when the Township and Range grid is initially downloaded or they can be modified from Google Earth itself. Either way, the option screens are the same. The following illustrations show how to modify the grid after it is opened in Google Earth.

Sections and Quarter/Quarters By default, Sections are shown in purple, Quarter/Quarters are green. Click on the "Earth Point Townships" folder to set the options. Click for larger image.

Options Menu In this example, we will hide the quarter/quarters and change the section color to from purple to red. Click for larger image.

Color Picker Red is selected. Click for larger image.

Options Menu Quarter/Quarters is set to "Hidden". Section color is set to "Red". Click for larger image.

Modified Appearance The end result. Click for larger image.

Township and Range Updated

About twice each year, the Earth Point gets new township and range data from BLM. However, this spring, the data was not ready, so it has been almost a year since the last update.

Included in today's update
1) The coverage of quarter-quarters is expanded by about 20%, but within these areas, there are still quite a few gaps.
2) Alaska sections are correctly located. Previously, some of the BLM coordinates were based on the NAD27 datum, which led to a displacement of several hundred feet when plotted on the WGS84 Google Earth.
3) New section coverage for southwest Alaska.
4) Better section coverage along the California coast line.

Note: the resolution of the following illustrations is 1/10 of a degree. There are many updates to sections and to corners that are not shown here.

New BLM Quarter/Quarters Existing quarter/quarters are shown in green. New quarter/quarters are light green. There are often gaps within the green areas. There is no quarter-quarter coverage in Alaska. Click for larger image.

New BLM Sections Alaska Existing sections are shown in dark purple. New sections are light purple. Click for larger image.

New BLM Sections Existing sections are shown in dark purple. New sections are light purple. Click for larger image.

New Servers, Back On-line

Our hosting company, Mosso, has moved Earth Point to new servers. Unfortunately, in the process of learning this was necessary we were off-line for much of Wednesday and Thursday. This was triggered by three events.

First, we are slowly adding AJAX technology to Earth Point. After a few problems, our hosting company determined that we needed to be on a server that had the latest ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 installed.

Second, Earth Point had a bug that caused the “application pool” to fill up. Once filled, no one could use the site. We made a few changes, and the pool is functioning normally.

Finally, another team at our hosting company determined that the Township and Range data (22 million records) needed to be on a newer server. The Quarters table was unavailable for a few hours, but everything is back online.

By the way, we have been with Mosso for over a year and I am quite happy with them.

Forum Introduced

Earth Point has a new forum page. Earth Point will soon exceed 1,000 visits per day, so I think there are enough people to make it work. As always, you are welcome to write or call me personally. That said, one nice thing about a forum is that everyone benefits from the questions and can participate in the answers. Included is a section called "Excel To Kml Showcase". I have seen a few of the spreadsheets, and they are amazing. Please feel free to post them here. You might need to trim them, as there is a 1MB per file limit. You can get to the forum from the Earth Point menu, or click here.

Reticule Added To Grid Systems

A reticule, or cross-hair, has been added to the center of the Grid Systems screen. As shown in the screen shot below, the current coordinates are displayed when the cursor is placed over the reticule. The current position is also displayed in the "Places" window on the left side of the screen. If either the reticule or the places view is clicked, a pop-up balloon lists the current position in a variety of coordinate systems: Latitude/Longitude, UTM, UPS, MGRS, and GeoRef.


Click for larger image.