I don't seem to see anybody on this forum bringing this up yet. So I guess I will. If any of you are on the tritongps Yahoo! Group, you would have seen this already. It's a program made by the same man that brought you many GPS tools, Mikhail Sharonov. Here is a link below to his latest achievement. A raster map creator for your Triton. It still needs a little work for calibration, from talks on the Yahoo! Group mailings. He is going to add more image format support as well.

http://www.msh-tools.com/triton.html

I have used it and so far I get awesome satellite maps using USAPhotoMaps and then reprojecting them to WGS84 lat/long datum using FWTools and a batch file. Then using his program to calibrate and create the map in the rmp file format. VantagePOint and the Triton 2000 I own both come up pretty nicely on screen.

Nice info, thanks!

I just created a 35 MB raster map using this TritonRMP software, and it seems to work GREAT! The map shows up at zoom levels 100-500. The image is clear, and the accuracy (using 5 calibration points: 4 corners and 1 center) seems good, although I haven't spent much time testing it yet. I tried making a 75 MB map, but the file size exceeded the memory of the program.



A quick note to everyone and anyone who helped create this program and research the Triton .rmp format... words cannot express my gratitude for all your hard work! THANK YOU!!! GRACIAS!!! DANKE!!! СПАСИБО!!!

The latest version is 1.3, currently anyways, until he updates it again with some other fix. The latest version now accepts a lot of different image formats and fixed a slight calibration point floating problem.

Just what I've been looking for. This program is wonderful Oooh the possibilities Simple to use Thanks for the info zimmy

Can someone make a short tutorial on hwo to use this? I'm kind of lost, although I understand the general concept, I just need to figure out how to prep the image, and get the calibration points.

Thanks!
Chris

I guess the creator is working on being able to use Google Maps and so forth:

I could write up a small tutorial on what I did using only the USAPhotoMaps program along with FWTools to reproject the images before using the TritonRMP program to calibrate and create the final map.

I'd be very interested to know how you did this, I'm currently trying to use small bitmaps exported from memory map, but the projection is all wrong and I have absolutely no idea how to use FWTools to correct it

cheers

idt

I guess he made it a bit easier using a separate FREE program to download Google images and automatically make them to OziExplorer .map file which then in turn gets imported into his program and you simply hit the Creat RMP button!

Is there a special process to always get the zoom level to show at 100-500?
I was experimenting to see what is the highest resolution possible. I needed a large file size, well focused, high resolution image to start with so I downloaded a .jpg of Miss October. Using the TritonRMP application, I put calibration markers on her POI's (Points Of Interest) and then converted with various scales (degrees of separation?) Results:
pixels/degree - - - shows at Triton zoom levels
35000 - - - - - - 200, 300, 500, 800 ft
38889 - - - - - - 200, 300, 500
46667 - - - - 100, 200, 300, 500
70000 - - - - 100, 200, 300

Fathom, did your image just happen to be about 50000 pxl/degree, or do you get the same 4 close zoom levels for any pixel scale?
Mikhail, maybe you can answer?

Thus far, I've only made two .rmp maps:

1:
-11218x23241 pixels
-orig .jpg image: 56 MB
-.rmp image: 95.8 MB
-52179 pix/deg
-zoom level: 100-500

2:
-11781x9699 pixels
-orig .tiff image: 77 MB
-.rmp image: 34 MB
-55570 pix/deg
-zoom level: 100-500

It looks like my zoom levels fall neatly within your study. Odd how the .jpg image increased in size when converted, and alternately how the .tiff image size shrunk.
Have you been able to calculate the change in elevation between POI's at the various scales?

OOH, this is gettin' dirty.

Try July for a higher quality image and more POI's. Stop messing around with your "GPS", it might lock up.

Okay, I've been creating the best map of Canada ever and in the process looked over all possible applications for downloading raster data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
So here is what I found:
The main problem with Google is banning. If you download too fast or too much your IP will be banned for 24 hours. MSFT is much better and doesn't ban if you download couple of Gigs in an hour.
So the verdict is the following:
The best of all is a custom build of gMapmaker: http://forum.mgmaps.com/viewtopic.php?p=11229#11229
This build is able to download maps from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask, etc. including hybrid maps which are most interesting since they have road and places names on them. This build is much better than regular 0.7.0.0, because Google banned after downloading just one layer for my map.
And TritonRMP can directly use these maps, without any additional conversion.

The worst of all are shareware applications: Google Map Downloader, Google Satellite Image Downloader and Universal Map Downloader(works with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo). The main problem with these applications is that they want money and don't do any good. They allow to save only bmp images which have to be calibrated and they use incorrect coordinate conversion which results in incorrect offset in resulting image. It's really hard to calibrate them afterwards, since every layer has it's own incorrect offset. I spent about half day trying to fix it.
Additional honorable mentions are:
GoogleMV - great Russian piece of SW, allows selecting area to save while viewing actual Google map and very user-friendly. The only problem - works only with Google. http://www.silber2004.narod.ru/GoogleMV1.zip
Satmap - attempt to create something similar to GoogleMV, but not so fully featured as original and with the same drawbacks. http://satmap.narod.ru/satmap_v1.3.1.15.7z

Also for image calibration I use Global Mapper 10 http://www.globalmapper.com/. It's a nice application which understand hundreds or different formats and projections and can do a lot of conversions and other minor changes in data.

Here are some pictures.
First I used publicly available from the goverment 50k Canada Topo map.

As you can see it's not very detailed (800 ft scale) and has only one layer, but on other side it contains topo lines. I wasn't quite satisfied with it, so I move to the aerial and satellite raster data. I downloaded from Microsoft Live Maps hybrid maps for scale levels 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Hybrid maps are much better than regular satellite maps because they have labels on top of satellite photo. Size of the area in a map is about 18''x36''. Total size of the downloaded data is more then 500MB. Resulting RMP file is about 200MB.
And here is what I see on the Triton now:

High scale levels.


Low scale levels. Pay special attention to the size of the Parliament building and footpaths in the Confederation park.
In my opinion it's amazing! You get raster map even at lowest scale! And detail is about 1-2 feet per pixel.
My next steps are maps of Gatineau, Algonquin, Frontenac and may be even Adirondack.