Waypoint Creator can save your day!

NemaStudio and NemaTalker both implement ‘automatic sailing’. This is achieved by activating either the Auto or Navigate function. Both functions require a waypoint file as input. The waypoint file must contain waypoints formatted according the NMEA WPL sentence, more specific the $GPWPL sentence.

As you may know it is a pain to create such a file manually, mainly because of the way the waypoint latitude and longitude must be formatted. Take the following example of a WPL sentence:

$GPWPL,2401.28276,N,07726.39282,W,WP09243069*55

When we dissect this sentence we get the following result:

$GPWPL = sentence id
2401.28276,N = latitude (24° 01.28276’ N)
07726.39282,W = longitude (77° 26.39282’ W)
WP09243069 = name of waypoint
55 = checksum

You can imagine that when you have to write out a few hundred waypoints this way it can easily ruin your day.

This is where WaypointCreator comes to help. I wrote this handy utility over the weekend because people were asking me for it for years now, but I always gave it a low priority because I hated the hassle with copyrights of navigational charts one has to deal with in such an app.

But now we have Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth! Great applications giving us free detailed maps over the internet. WaypointCreator is using Virtual Earth because I found a handy open source control based on VE here , saving me a lot of time. I wrote a small .Net application encapsulating the control, and voilá: Waypoint Creator was born.

You can download, install and use Waypoint Creator for free from the Sailsoft website, here is the direct download link.