
Whereami.exe is a program that gives vectors (distance and direction)
from the nearest five places in the U.S. when you enter your latitude
and longitude in the following format:

Degrees <space> Minutes.Decimal Minutes

It is intended to be used with a GPS receiver and a palmtop computer
running DOS 5.0 or higher, such as an HP-100 or HP-200.

It works by scanning a file called LATLNG.TXT.  A text file downloadable
from the U.S. Census Bureau that contains the location of virtually every
named city, town, and village in the U.S..  This file is part of their
TIGER database and can be had at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ .

LATLNG.TXT is a sizeable text file of approximately 1.5 MB.  What the
Census Bureau considers to be the center of any town is beyond the scope
of this text, and me for that matter.  More information on this is
available at their web site.

On an HP-100 with an SRAM Flashcard it takes six minutes fifteen seconds
to scan the entire country.  This time can be reduced by editting the
text file to remove states that you may not need.

The purpose of this program is to enable one to locate themselves using
any map.  The vectors given should identify a location accurate to less
than one tenth of a mile, anywhere in the U.S..

This program helps to fill the gap between GPS recievers that do not
contain detailed maps, and notebook PCs running the latest mapping software.

In a nutshell, the program logic is thus.  For speed, it only considers
places within 1.5 degrees of longitude and 1.0 degrees of latitude.
It then calculates the distances to these places and displays the
closest five.  It was written in C++.

This program may be distributed as freeware with this text file attached.

For questions or comments drop me a note.  Bruce A. Wright (bw@en.com) .



