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UTM

UTM stands for Universal Transverse Mercator. It is a Transverse Mercator map projection which can be used at any place on the globe. To cover the whole earth, the system is divided into multiple grids, using 60 zones, each covering 6 degrees which is about 800 kilometers in width.

Each zone is defined for both the northern and southern hemisphere. Therefore the zones are called zone 1N - zone 60N for the northern hemisphere and zone 1S - zone 60S for the southern hemisphere.

This document is going to explain, how you can add support for UTM coordinates to your VBScript scripts.

UTM Zones

The following table describes which zone should be used on any given location on the earth, and its associated Transverse Mercator parameters:

The Eye4Software GPS Toolkit

The Eye4Software GPS toolkit allows software developers to add GPS functionality to their own programs without the need to have any knowledge on serial communications and GPS protocols like RS-232 and NMEA0183.

The product can be used in many programming environments, such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual Studio.Net, Borland C++ Builder, Borland Delphi and VBA, but also web oriented applications such as ASP, ASP.NET and PHP, and all other programming environments that support ActiveX.

Prerequisites

First you must have a VBScript editor and the Eye4Software GPS Component installed on your computer. If you do not have a dedicated VBScript editor, notepad will do. You can download the Eye4Software GPS Component here.

Creating the project

To create your VBScript, you can just use notepad or any other text editor. Create a file with a ".vbs" extension.

Declare and create the object(s)

On top of your script, please add the following code to declare the objects:

Dim objProjection
Dim objDatum

And the following code to create an instance of the object:

Set objProjection   = CreateObject ( "Eye4Software.GpsProjection" )
Set objDatum        = CreateObject ( "Eye4Software.GpsDatumParameters" )

The source code

The source code below demonstrates how to add latitude / longitude to UTM transformation functionality to your script using the GPS Toolkit:

' ConvUTM VBScript demo - Eye4Software GPS Toolkit
' This demo shows how to convert a latitude/longitude coordinate to an UTM coordinate.
' For more information on how to use the Eye4Software GPS Toolkit with VBScript, 
' visit http://www.eye4software.com/products/gpstoolkit/source#vbscript

Option Explicit

Dim objProjection, objDatum

Set objProjection = CreateObject ( "Eye4Software.GpsProjection"      )
Set objDatum  		= CreateObject ( "Eye4Software.GpsDatumParameters" )

WScript.Echo "Eye4Software GPS Toolkit " & objProjection.Version & " - UTM Grid Conversion Demo" 
WScript.Echo

' Set UTM Datum  ( NAD27 )
' The ID for NAD27 is 4267, see 'http://www.eye4software.com/resources/datums' for a full list of supported datums 
objDatum.LoadFromId ( 4267 )

' Set Source coordinates ( WGS84)
objProjection.Latitude		=   62.665
objProjection.Longitude		= -117.500

WScript.Echo "Convert from Latitude / Longitude to UTM"
WScript.Echo
WScript.Echo "Latitude    = " & objProjection.Latitude
WScript.Echo "Longitude   = " & objProjection.Longitude
WScript.Echo

' Perform the transformation
objProjection.ToUtm objDatum

' Return the result
WScript.Echo "Result: " & objProjection.LastError & " (" & objProjection.LastErrorDescription & ")"
WScript.Echo

If ( objProjection.LastError = 0 ) Then
	WScript.Echo "Northing    = " & FormatNumber ( objProjection.Northing, 3, 0, 0, 0 )
	WScript.Echo "Easting     = " & FormatNumber ( objProjection.Easting,  3, 0, 0, 0 )

  ' Display autodetected zone, we use the same zone for the inverse calculation
  If ( objProjection.Zone >= 0 ) Then
    WScript.Echo "UTM Zone    = " & Abs ( objProjection.Zone ) & "N"
  Else
    WScript.Echo "UTM Zone    = " & Abs ( objProjection.Zone ) & "S"
  End If
End If

' Make sure you always set the 'Zone' parameter when using the 'FromUtm' function. It has now been set by 'ToUtm' already.
objProjection.FromUtm objDatum

WScript.Echo 
WScript.Echo "Convert from UTM to Latitude / Longitude"
WScript.Echo
WScript.Echo "Latitude    = " & FormatNumber ( objProjection.Latitude , 6, 0, 0, 0 ) 
WScript.Echo "Longitude   = " & FormatNumber ( objProjection.Longitude, 6, 0, 0, 0 ) 

WScript.Echo "Ready."