Contents - Index

Overlay Mapper

The unique Overlay Map uses a concept first developed for my popular ham-mapping suite, the Global Overlay Mapper  (Link will open in your Browser). The Overlay Map has 3 zoom-levels and features 16 different overlays: Background, Country, Satellite Earth, Topo Relief, Satellite Night-View, Time-Zones, CQ Zones, ITU Zones, Grid Locators, Lat/Lon Grid, Names, States, Cities, Prefix, Flags, and Scale Bar. These overlays can be stacked in any order over the Background Layer to present a composite map-image, and then markers, IOTA bounding boxes, and grid square polygons can be plotted on the top. There is a button for each of the overlays. Its colour changes to a lighter shade to indicate that it is currently turned on. The overlay on the top has its text colour changed to white. Some of the overlays are transparent, and others are not, so many different effects can be realised by changing the overlay stacking order.

The Overlay Map shows exactly the same range of markers and polygons as the Online Map. These items are stored in 7 separate maps layers that can be independently turned on and off to show, hide, or clear any of the markers or polygons. Controls to do this can be found under the 'Markers' menu-button. There are 37 different types of markers, and any of them can be assigned to the different map-markers. To change which marker is being used for a particular entity, click 'Help > Options > Markers' or 'Help > Options > POI Markers'. (POI stands for Point Of Interest).

The Overlay Map can zoom to three different sizes. Scrollbars appear when the Overlay Map is bigger than the programme-window. To zoom the Overlay Map in or out, use your mouse-wheel.

As you move your mouse over the map, a box will follow your mouse-position that shows the current latitude/longitude map-position under the mouse, in decimal degrees. South and West values are negative. If you wish, the mouse-position label can be turned off by clicking 'Help > Options > Mapping > Show Map Mouse-Position'.

If you have any markers or polygons (such as Grid Squares or IOTA bounding boxes) plotted on the map, the text of the mouse-location window will change to show their names. Right-clicking over a marker or a polygon will show a context-menu with a number of commands that allow you to perform a Spatial Query on a table: Query Geocoded Calls, Query Corrected Calls, Query Gazetteer, Query Postcodes, Query IOTA Table, Query SOTA Table, Query DXCC Table, Query Shires Table, Query WWFF Table, Query ARLHS Table, Query WLOTA Table. Note that their function differs whether you have right clicked a marker or a polygon. If you right-click a marker, the Spatial Query will order the selected table by distance, with the position of the marker as the center-point. If you right-click a polygon, the Spatial Query will only return those entities who's position is located within the bounds of the polygon.