Finding lakes with GPS?

[Chad Smith]

I got a TomTom Nav Unit for Xmas, and want to use it to find distant lakes. As far as I know lakes do not have addresses. Why should they, its not like you're going to send them a thank you card. However I was thinking that surveyers have an address for every home and business being built, while noone has built any lakes, homes/business' get built around lakes.

With all this in mind I came up with a way to reach the lakes using my Nav unit without having a solid address. In the Sportsman Connection Fishing book, the DNR or Author or whoever gives you grid coordinates. I enter that into the GPS and I am in the area within about 400 yds or so. Sometimes on the other side of the lake, but no problem. Does anyone know if the new fishing books have different coordinates from the older one?

Ok, I get to the boat launch at the lake and ask TomTom my current location and I get an address. Maybe it is a house a couple hundred yards away or maybe lakes do have addresses. ??? Any and all input is greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

[MildBill]

There are multiple ways to solve your problem. Some of them are fairly easy - and free besides. First, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has been hiring college students to find the locations (in decimal degrees) of landmarks throughout the US for many years. This is called the geographic name service, and I believe that it has somewhere around 6,000,000 entries. These range from crossroads, schools and cemeteries to lakes. Chances are that you will find the geographic location of most features that you might be interested in. However, that has some drawbacks. Place names can be ambiguous - just think of how many Round Lakes, Long Lakes and Island Lakes there are.

On the other hand, I believe that the best bet for you is a free Web Browser from ESRI called ArcGIS Explorer. You can go to the ESRI web site and download it for free. When you start up the application you can specify the nearest unambiguous location and it will zoom to the appropriate satellite image (using the Geographic Name Service). For example, "Houghton Lake, MI" will take you to the middle of Houghton Lake. By looking at the satellite photo (you may need to zoom in) you can find the actual site you are interested in. It will report the geographic coordinates, and if it is on a road, you can ask it to "find the address". It will actually give you the street address, which you can then load into your GPS instrument. (These addresses are not found by surveyors, but are done programatically.)

Let me know if you have any questions, but the application is pretty sparse so you should have no problem running it. By the way, the application will generally save the image in a cache after the first time you zoom to an area, so you can actually access the image once you are off line. You can use a laptop to get around without having to log in if you plan ahead well.

[Chad Smith]

Very helpful! Thank you very much!!

[malainse]

http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/MRBIS/countysearch.asp

A lot of boat launches are listed on the above link. Click on the county then the given lake/launch. The GPS # for that launch are listed... Some also have link to maps of lake.

or on the left side of the page use "Browse the map" but, I have found that slow to load even using DSL...
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http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/miswims/MapPage.aspx

The above map gives GPS # as you move your mouse around the map. Use street view to get in given area as that is the fastest to load. Then can click on aerial or other options.
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Also sent this as a PM