Land Survey coordinates to UTM

February 14, 2006 11:34 AM

Is anyone aware of a program that converts The United States Public Land Survey (such as found on platt maps) coordinates into UTM coordinates? I would like to input land survey coordinates and have it convert the data to UTM coordinates for my GPS. Many thanks...
posted by orlin to Technology (5 answers total)

It's my understanding that PLSS coordinates are an approximation rather than based upon exact coordinates. That said, aren't they based rather loosely upon lat/lon? I think it would be easier to get them into a lat/lon format then from there are numerous programs to convert lat/lon to utm.
posted by rlef98 at 11:50 AM on February 14, 2006

It should be a simple matter of writing an Excel spreadsheet to do that as long as you have the conversion factor. A section is a mile by a mile.
posted by JJ86 at 12:43 PM on February 14, 2006

It might be easier to convert if you have a coordinate from the State Plane System. The problem with trying a direct conversion is that there are always discrepancies between originally platted lands and actual distances. Sometimes these discrepancies can be large. That is one of the reasons why surveyors get paid the big bucks.
posted by JJ86 at 1:04 PM on February 14, 2006

Best answer: When looking for conversion numbers be aware there are numerous projections from round globe to flat map compounded my intial survey errors. I'm not familiar with US data but for example here in Canada you'd be worried about what zone you are in, which projection was used, whether you were in NAD 27 or NAD 83, etc. Even something as small as a section of land is only a mile on the sides, the top and bottom are some slight, different, amount only approximately equal to a mile.
posted by Mitheral at 2:07 PM on February 14, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks to all...
posted by orlin at 9:35 AM on February 15, 2006