+travisl Posted July 28, 2003 Posted July 28, 2003 Yesterday, my father and I took the boat out on the local fjord, and spent three hours collecting 362 waypoints (lat., long., and depth of the water). I was hoping to bring this data into Excel, use it's ''surface'' chart tool, and end up with a map of the bottom of the fjord. Unfortunately, Excel requires the X and Y coordinates (lat. and long., in this case), to be evenly spaced. They aren't. Does anyone know of any freeware or low-price shareware that might be able to chart this data into a 3D topographical-type chart? The first five rows of data are here, if anyone wants to play with it. Depth (ft) Longitude Latitude -3.2808 -123.12745 47.42551 -9.8424 -123.12725 47.4255 -19.6848 -123.12717 47.42535 -39.3696 -123.12684 47.42523 -114.828 -123.12603 47.42516 WWJD? JW RTFM. Quote
+Criminal Posted July 28, 2003 Posted July 28, 2003 Well, I can contribute nothing to this other than to reply so as to keep poor Travis (who's having a lot of trouble finding caches without a mob) from having his post go reply-less. So I'm helping and getting dig in at the same time. http://fp1.centurytel.net/Criminal_Page/ Quote
+parkrrrr Posted July 28, 2003 Posted July 28, 2003 Are you looking for something that can coerce your data into a lattice for Excel, or something that will generate the pretty pictures directly? I once wrote some software that coerced the data into a lattice and then optionally generated the pretty pictures from the resulting lattice, but it was expensive and proprietary. I do have a (legally obtained) copy of that software, so if you just want a pretty (2D) picture or two I might be able to make that happen. I don't remember whether it was capable of re-exporting the gridded data or not; I think maybe it was. The issue with just using the data as is rather than creating a lattice using some kind of interpolation is that outliers in your dataset can seriously mess with the resulting pretty pictures. Quote
Dragonmaster Posted July 28, 2003 Posted July 28, 2003 Well I don't know of any cheap or freeware program to do this, However MathCAD does an excelent job of this. I was able to import and graph your data as a surface,contour,scatter or just about any other 3-D graph I wanted. If you want I could generate a graph for you if you sent me the whole data file, not as good as playing with it yourself but still something. I did a google and came up with this page showing a lot of cheap graphing software as well http://www.imagespro.com/programs/math/0-3.html if you explore those you may find a program that will do what you want Quote
+BigBirdNL Posted July 28, 2003 Posted July 28, 2003 This is not my part of the game, but you can try Terrain Tools. Or GPS TrackMaker. Or Digital Groove. BigBird CacheMaps homepage Quote
+travisl Posted July 28, 2003 Author Posted July 28, 2003 Digital Grove's 'Surfer 8' demo did it for me -- thanks, BigBirdNL. If you're curious, here's three of the maps that it generated from my batch of 359 waypoints (3 were bad): Contour map: 3-D wireframe: And a colored surface map: Very cool. Thanks, all. WWJD? JW RTFM. Quote
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