[QGIS-Developer] USNG Coordinate System

[Joshua Quesenberry]

Barry,

I guess the kind of support I'm looking for would be the ability to create points using USNG coordinates, importing points from a file full of USNG formatted coordinates, seeing coordinates listed in USNG format in the window at the bottom of the window, saving in a shapefile, etc. I didn't realize Shapefile's can't store USNG format, so I guess that's does present issues...

USNG is now FEMA's standardized coordinate system, which includes Search & Rescue, which I do a lot of. So imagine being in the middle of an operation where USNG is being used... a team radios in the location of a clue or a patient, the next step for the GIS person right now would have to be converting  the USNG coordinate to either UTM or Lat Lon, this all takes extra time and I haven't been able to find a good offline coordinate converter. Ideally you switch the layer to edit mode, navigate to the location, and click to add the point. If there were an "Add Point" button that pops up a dialog where you enter a USNG/UTM/LatLon coordinate would be a little better more. If I have a list of points to add right now I usually just create a csv, import the csv, and save as a shapefile.

Thanks,

Josh Q

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Dobias [mailto:wonder.sk at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 5:43 AM
To: Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk>
Cc: Joshua Quesenberry <engnfrc at gmail.com>; qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] USNG Coordinate System

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Would that be useful to you? It could be implemented as a Qgis python 
> function - its some string parsing and numeric manipulation.

There are few plugins that add support for some coordinate systems - for example this plugin translates between map coordinates and OSGB Grid Ref (e.g. SX 7511 8607):
https://github.com/mtravis/gridref-qgis

You could use that one as a reference for your translator. It could be also a nice piece of functionality directly in QGIS where plugins could register their converter and QGIS would handle all the GUI related functionality (which plugins currently need to do themselves).

Cheers
Martin