Google Maps
Unfortunately, the mobile versions of Google Earth and Google Maps do not currently (at the time of writing) support image overlays, so you can't just put a kmz on your phone and view it. What they can do is view vector graphics, but not directly from a file. Say you wanted to display some vector graphics (i.e. lines or placemarks), first save them to a kml file. Now go to Google Maps (on your computer, not your mobile device), where you will see a button called 'My places'. Clicking that will show you a list of vector files you have uploaded to Google. You can upload a new one by 'CRATE MAP' button. Give it a name, and select whether or not you want it publicly available, then click the import link and upload your kml file. Finally press the 'DONE' button.
Now onto your mobile device. Turn the GPS on if necessary, and load up Google Maps. Press the layers button at the top. One of the options will be 'My Maps'. Selecting this should bring up a list of the files you have uploaded. Selecting one will display it on Google Maps. If only this worked with image overlays, that would be nice and easy. You could of course draw some points, lines and polygons over features on your geophysics results and use that, but that would be cheating. We want a real image overlay! So here we go, two methods of doing just that.
Method 1 : With A Laptop
The first method will use a laptop, running Google Earth. I am assuming that the Windows operating system is used. Apologies to those that don't use it. Using a laptop means displaying the image overlays is not a problem, but causes us two other problems.
Firstly, Google Earth needs the internet to display it's own imagery. If you somehow have access to WiFi in the middle of a field, well that's nice for you, but most likely you won't. The easiest way to deal with this is tethering to a mobile device. Android devices have the ability to set themselves up as a WiFi hotspot, transferring the data over the phone network. Beware though, if you get a phone free, or cheap, as part of a package from a carrier, it is more than likely that they will have disabled tethering, because they don't like people actually using devices how they want. If you buy a SIM free phone yourself and get a SIM from a carrier separately, you should be alright. Make sure your contract has a monthly data allowance, or you will end up paying a lot of money.
Secondly, laptops don't have a GPS in them, but we can get around that as well. You can buy stand alone GPS units that can connect to a computer via USB. They are quite cheap. Personally, I have a QStarz BT-818XT, which works fine with what I am describing. You may have noticed that Google Earth has some options for dealing with GPS, but personally I have not much luck with it. I tend to use a program called EarthBridge instead. So here are the steps for using it.
1) Plug your GPS into your laptop and turn it on.
2) Check which COM port that your GPS device appears as. You might need to load a driver for it for this to work, which is dependant on the device used. You can see which devices are linked to which COM port in the Device Manager in Windows.
3) Load Google Earth.
4) Load EarthBridge.
5) Go to the 'Preferences' tab in EarthBridge. Change the 'COM Port' to the one observed in the Windows device manager. It is usual for the other connection settings to be 9600/8/None/1/None, but check with the documentation for your GPS to see what the setting should be if you have problems. Set a suitable folder for 'Save KML files to:'. You will need this for later.
6) Press the 'Connect to GPS Device' Button at the bottom. If all is well, you should see some NMEA output and satellite information in the 'GPS Status' tab.
7) Now we want to configure how things appear on Google Earth, so go to the 'KML Output Settings' tab. UNTICK the checkboxes marked 'Use Altitude Data If Available', 'Show the track information' and 'Fly To Placemark on Update'. Get rid of the placemark title and disable 'Show Speed'. Now you can press the 'Start' button at the bottom.
8) Go to Google Earth and in the 'Add' menu, select 'Network Link'. Browse to the directory you noted in point 5, and select the earthbridge-data.kml file. You should now hopefully see a dot representing your position appear on Google Earth, woohoo! The dot is a bit chunky, it could do with being a cross-hair, but it will do.
On the plus side, you have all the functionality of the full version of Google Earth, with turning layers on and off, and scrolling around however much you wish. On the minus side, carrying around a laptop with a GPS dangling from it is clunky, plus it is never easy to see a laptop screen outdoors.
Method 2 : With a Mobile Device
If we don't like lugging a laptop around a field, you can use a more portable device, such as a smartphone or tablet. Here, I will be assuming that an android device is used, but a method similar to this may work with other mobile operating systems. Unlike with the laptop, we will have no problem with the GPS or internet access, but we will have problems displaying the image in the first place. As mentioned above, the mobile versions of Google Earth/Maps don't currently support image overlays, oh woe and thrice woe. There is a way to do it though, but it is a dark and convoluted path, not for the faint hearted. The rumours of animal sacrifice involved in these dark arts are entirely fictitious. Fortunately, all of the software involved is free.
1) You will need lots of software for this task. First of all download the OSGEO4W installer. Run it, select 'Advanced Install', then 'Install from Internet', then 'All Users' and select the directory into which you want all this software installed, remembering this for later. Use whatever 'Local Package Directory' it chooses, unless there is a problem, then tell it what kind of internet setup you have. You will see various categories of software that you can install.
2) From the Commandline_Utilities category, make sure that gdal and proj are selected. From the Desktop category, make sure that qgis is selected. Everything else needed should be automatically selected as dependencies of those. pressing the Next button will start the install.
3) Even more software, download OruxMapsDesktop. It doesn't have an installer since it is a java application, so just unpack it from its zip file and put the directory somewhere.
4) Yet more software. Install the OruxMaps application on your android mobile device. You can search for it in the android marketplace. It's free.
5) Now we have all the software we need we can begin. Start by creating a directory somewhere where you can put all of the files associated with this. I have used the directory E:\Data\gis\oruxtest, so if you see that directory in the following explanations, you will know what that means, and you can replace that with whatever directory you are using.
6) The area that you are viewing on your mobile device will be limited to a single image that you can save from Google Earth as a jpg, so you need to pick the area you are viewing carefully. This means no scrolling around a large area, and you can't turn layers on and off. Bear in mind that if the area you are viewing is too large, you wont see much resolution on the geophysics, and wont be able to make out the features very well. If the viewing area is too small, you will only have a tiny area to walk around. Don't forget that as well as using your mouse wheel to zoom in and out, you can get a finer control on the zoom by holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse up and down. Once you have selected the are you wish to walk around, we need to mark it up for georeferencing.
7) You need to add 4 placemarks to the area you are viewing. It helps the next process if they are arranged in a square or rectangle, and it helps you if they are reasonably round numbers. They will also need to be near the corners of the area you are viewing. Right click on your placemarks and select Properties. So they don't get in the way too much, change the icon (button at top right) to a small circle and reduce the scale of the icon ('Style/Colour' tab) to 0.7. Big enough that you can see it on the resulting image, but not too big that it gets in the way. Reduce the scale of the label to 0.1, because we don't need it and don't want it getting in the way. Manually change the Latitude and Longitude so they are roughly in a square or rectangle around the area you are viewing. This is best explained by the example image below, and some real numbers associated with it. If you click on the image below, you will see the four dots, one in each corner. Their coordinates are as follows :
Top-left: 50.914000 Lat 0.022000 Long
Top-right: 50.914000 Lat 0.026000 Long
Bottom-left: 50.911500 Lat 0.022000 Long
Bottom-right: 50.911500 Lat 0.026000 Long
You can see that the numbers have been manually rounded, so as to make a rectangle. You will need to make a note of the numbers that you use for later.
8) Once you have the 4 georeferencing points and the display area perfect, you need to save an image of what you can see, just like in the image above. Go the the 'File' menu, then 'Save', then 'Save Image...', and save the file in the directory that you created in point 5. In this example, the file I have used is called bartest.jpg, so if you see that name later on, you know that you can replace it with your own filename.
9) Now we need to georeference the image. For this, you will need the coordinates that you noted in point 7. If you go to the windows start menu, you should see some of the new software you installed earlier, in the OSGEO4W menu. In that menu, you will find Quantum GIS. Run that now
10) We will need the georeferencer, so go to the 'Plugins' menu, then Georeferencer > Georeferencer.
11) We need to load the image we have just exported from Google Earth. Click the leftmost icon at the top. If you hover the mouse pointer over it, it should say 'Open raster'. Click on this and select the file you have saved from Google Earth. It should appear on the screen in front of you, with the four small dots near each corner.
12) Click the Zoom In tool up the top. It looks like a magnifying glass with a plus underneath it. Click a couple of times on the dot in the top-left of your image, it should be a lot clearer now. Select the 'Add point' icon at the top. It looks like 3 dots. Aim the mouse pointer at the centre of the circle and click. You will be presented with a window that asks for X and Y coordinates. You will need the coordinates that you noted from point 7. Enter the coordinates relating to this point, with the Latitude going in Y and the Longitude in X. Then hit OK. You need to repeat this for the other three points, which can be reached with the 'Zoom Out' icon, which looks like a magnifying glass with a minus under it, and/or the 'Pan' icon, which looks like a hand. You should end up with something like the image below. Make sure the coordinates are typed in correctly, it is very easy to get them wrong and mess up this part of the process.
13) Once the coordinates for those four points have been entered, click the 'Transformation settings' icon up the top, which looks like a spanner. Set the 'Transformation type' to 'Helmert', the 'Resampling method' to 'Cubic' and the 'Target SRS' to 'EPSG:4326'. The 'Output raster' should be the same filename as the file that you selected to begin with, but with an extension of .tif, so for example 'E:\Data\gis\oruxtest\bartest.jpg' is output as 'E:\Data\gis\oruxtest\bartest.tif'. Once this is all filled in, click OK. An example of how the screen should filled out is given below :
14) Click the 'Start georeferencing' button, which looks like a green play button. This should create a georeferenced image in your directory. This image is a TIF file, which is a standard type of image file, but embedded within this is information as to the geographic location of the image. Embedding this information turns this file into something called a GeoTIF. Find your working folder in windows and open the image. You will probably see that the image has been rotated slightly, with the surrounding area filled in with black. If you find that the image has been rotated a lot, or it has been stretched in one direction, then you have probably entered some of the coordinates wrong, and must start again. If all is well, then we can progress to the next stage. The next stage doesn't seem to like GeoTIFs however, so we must convert it. I wont go into the details of the whys or wherefores too much, I will just tell you what you need to do.
15) To make this easier for the second time around, and to save typing, we are going to create a batch file. In your working directory, create a text file, and put in the following four lines :
c:\osgeo4w\bin\gdal_translate -co "TFW=YES" %1.tif intermediate.tif
c:\osgeo4w\bin\gdal_translate -of PNG %1.tif %1.png
rename intermediate.tfw %1.pgw
del intermediate.tif
If the OSGEO4W software was installed in point 1 was installed anywhere else that c:\osgeo4w, when you will need to change these to the correct location. Save the file, then rename it to 'orux_translate.bat'
16) A new piece of software now, the OSGEO4W shell, in the 'OSGEO4W' menu, there is another menu called 'OSGEO4W' followed by 'OSGeo4W Shell'. Run this.
17) This is like a normal Windows shell, except a few other things are set up for us. We now need to get to our working directory. In my case, that is 'E:\data\gis\oruxtest', which means I should type :
E:
cd \data\gis\oruxtest
18) We can now use the batch file we have created to convert our GeoTIF image into something that the next piece of software can use ("More?", I hear you cry, "You want more?"). Type :
orux_translate bartest
Of course you need to replace bartest with the name of your file, without the extension at the end.
19) Almost there, don't give up now! Now we need to run the OruxMapsDesktop software. In the directory into which you installed the software in point 3, you will find 'OruxMapsDesktop.bat'. Run that.
20) The resulting screen should be filled out as per the image below. Ignore any warnings it brings up along the way. Click 'Calibration file' and select the file in your working directory ending '.pgw'. Click 'Image file' and select the file ending in '.png'. For the DATUM drop down box, select 'WGS 1984: Global Definition'. It is near the bottom of the list.For the PROJECTION drop down box, select 'LATITUDE/LONGITUDE'. In the box next to the 'Destiny Directory' button (the original language for this software is not English, can you tell), enter your working directory. Select 'png format' for the output. Click the 'Create Map' button.
21) If you now look in your working folder, you will see a new directory has appeared which contains an 'xml' and a 'db' file. You need to copy the whole directory, not just the files, to your mobile device. Turn on your mobile device and connect it to your computer with the USB charging cable. A 'Connect to PC' dialog will appear on your mobile device. Select 'Disk Drive'. You should not be able to treat your phone like any other USB mass storage device. Copy the directory you have just created into a directory on your phone called \oruxmaps\mapfiles. Now 'Safely Remove Hardware', just like you would with any normal USB mass storage device.
22) Go out into the field you want to wander about in. Make sure GPS is activated on your mobile device, and then load the OruxMaps App.Select Map offline, press 'Reset Map Sources' if your map is not there, then select your map. You should see something like in the image below. Press the wiggly line up the top and select 'Start GPS', and away you go, you can wander about your geophysics on your phone. Huzzah! The default cursor of the giant arrow is a bit of a blunt instrument for walking around in such a manner. You can select a better cursor in Settings > User Interface > Cursor > Cursor Icon. 'neodraig2' seems to be the best one there currently.
On the plus side you can walk around your geophysics using a genuinely portable device with a screen that works well outside. On the downside, you are limited to a single Google Earth image to walk around, and you can't do anything with layers. Plus, it's a hideously complicated process to do each image. If you thought it was complex to reproduce what I have done, imagine what it was like working out how to do it in the first place!
Accuracy
You might think that this is a good way to position trenches, but you would be wrong. Whilst survey grade GPS systems will get you to within a cm of where you want. consumer grade GPS's will get you within 6-8 metres of where you want, and there doesn't seem to be much available between the two extremes. There is also the Google Earth error. The imagery on Google Earth is not always exactly placed, so you make get another couple of metres error there. So as I mentioned at the start of the post, this is for walking around the geophysics and getting a feel for the place, but you can't rely on it being precise.
Hibernation Time
Well it's getting a bit chilly out there now, too chilly for geophysics, or rather too chilly for me doing geophysics, so this blog will be going quiet over the winter. Hopefully I will have some new and interesting results for you in the spring.
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