Vectoring from Cairo to Kinshasa.

February 22, 2013 11:12 AM

I'd like to produce an offset-print-quality map, modeled after airline flight path maps, which graphically reproduces hundreds of point-to-point connections: in this specific case, between radio transmitters and reception locations. What software is capable of producing some variation on this, perhaps by putting in GPS coordinates? (OS X please.)
posted by mykescipark to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

You could create a map using GIS software such as QGIS and export it for printing.
posted by golden at 11:41 AM on February 22, 2013

If you don't have programming knowledge and can at least get the segments into a table of X/Y points, it may be better to leave the heavy lifting to someone else and farm this out as a small job on Freelancer.com, especially if you might want to reuse the code later. From a programming standpoint this is a pretty easy job. The only way it would get complicated is if you want the line segments plotted as bezier splines like in the fancy airline route maps.
posted by crapmatic at 12:05 PM on February 22, 2013

I have done something similar using the maps, mapdata and mapproj packages in the (free) statistical software program R. It has a bit of a learning curve, though.
posted by gnimmel at 1:30 PM on February 22, 2013

The MMQGIS plugin for QGIS will do this for you. Load lat/long coordinates in as as a delimited layer and convert it to a shapefile before processing.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 1:51 PM on February 22, 2013