Department of Plant, Food, and Environmental Sciences

Faculty of Agriculture

Locate II

 

Locate II

A program to triangulate radiotelemetry bearings and calculate error ellipses by Vilis O. Nams. vilis.nams@dal.ca

This is a DOS-based program which replaces manually drawing bearings on maps and guesstimating where animals are located. It was published commercially by Pacer Computer Software, but as of June 2000 has been released into the public domain. It has been replaced by Locate III.

  • Locate.zip - size 241 KBytes, version 2.81, last revised May 18/2000

Locate II allows you to do the following

  • Enter bearings directly or import them from other programs
  • Define permanent telemetry stations as you enter bearings or import previously defined stations
  • Plot bearings obtained from radiotelemetry
  • Estimate locations and 95% error ellipses using Lenth Maximum Likelihood

Estimators

  • Save results to a file in whatever format you choose
  • Estimate a variety of statistics from each set of bearings
  • Plot background maps

Locate II is distributed for free, with the following conditions

  • That you mail me postcard with a real stamp (i.e. not a meter stamp) on it. This is for my wife, who collects stamps - she needs something for the time I spend on projects like this.
  • That you cite it if you publish research that uses it.
  • That if you pass it on to colleagues, you include the whole zipped collection of files.
  • That you send me citations of any papers you publish that use the program.

How to install

  • Download the file Locate.zip into the directory you want it to reside in.
  • Decompress it using an unzip program.
  • You don't need any installation program. Just run the Locate.exe file directly.

Locate.zip also contains

  • Manual.doc, a MSoft word version of the manual.
  • GIS.exe (see GISreadme.txt), a program for converting output from Locate II to forms that various GIS can use.