Tips on How to find your fields and How to make a field layout
Sites to use:
How to find your park/fields.
Since
your park or field sometimes doesn't really have an address, you have
find a close address on the same street and keep incrementing the
number part of the address to get the mapping sites to map them.
Example:
if you park is somewhere on Main Street and a close business or
building has an address of 400 Main Street, map the 400 Main Street,
then change the address to 450 Main Street and see how much closer it
will map to your field.
Quarks:- Street
names different - Sometimes a street has a different name once it
enters the city limits, so you might have to put in a different name.
- Address
might not be in town you think they are - the address might not be
serviced "postally" by a city you think it would fall under. So if you
have tried to map using the incremental number and it will never map
close enough, try doing it by latitude/longitude.
- To find
the latitude/longitude, pan(move) the map where the field/park is, do a
right-mouse at the entrance, and tell it to "map directions to here".
This should put the latitude/longitude into the direction field in the
form of "xx.xxxxxx, -xx.xxxxxx"
- Ok, remember those geography classes...
- The first number is Latitude (its the numeric representation of degrees, minutes, seconds)
- The second part is Longitiude.
- Now goto http://stevemorse.org/jcal/latlon.php and see if it will give you a close address or more information to go on, because that address might be serviced from another city.
- Use some combinations of the results to try to get one of the map sites to get close.
How to map a field layout
The
easiest way and most maintain-able way to make a field map is to
capture the satellite image from one of the mapping sites, save the
image as a JPG, then use MS Excel to number/label the items in the
park. This seems to be the best way, since most people have/can operate
MS Excel and its not too complicated to move objects and text boxes
around compared to a picture or photo program.
- Find your park using one of the sites above.
- Switch the site to "Aerial" or "Satellite" or "Hybrid".
- Make your browser go full screen.
- Zoom in to make the whole park fill your whole screen.
- You might have to close parts of the window to make the image bigger (look for little arrows).
- You can also shut off toolbars on your browser to make the image bigger.
- now take a snapshot by using the "Printscreen" button (top right of your keyboard)
- OR you can use a little program called "SnagIt" http://www.techsmith.com/
- then save the image as a JPG
- In MS Excel
- do "Insert, Picture, From File" ....and go find your file you saved from above.
- tip:
DO NOT just paste the image into Excel, this makes the document 10times
the the size it needs to be b/c MS converts the image to BMP which is
rather large (b/c a BMP image doesnt use compression)
- once image is inserted, do a right mouse on image, do "Order, Send to back"
- turn on your "Drawing" toolbar by doing "View, Toolbars, Drawing"
- use "text box" to label things
- use other stuff (like arrows) off the toolbar to show other things
- once complete, you can do Printscreen and save as JPG or use Snagit to capture your finished map