Custom Map Rulers for Any Map Scale

May 2018

I'm excited to announce our new custom map rulers. This is something that I've been working towards for a couple of years now. I've written the code to both draw the rulers and to allow you to design your customized ruler. I've also modified our shopping cart so that it's able to track orders for custom tools.

You can create a map ruler for any map scale you may encounter. The four long edges of the ruler will have scales for measuring:

• Latitude in Degrees, Minutes and Seconds, or Degrees and Decimal Minutes, or Decimal Degrees
• Longitude for a specified latitude. No more need to use the latitude scale at an angle!
• Miles statute or nautical, and divided into decimal or fractional subdivisions.
• Kilometers

The rulers we print and send you will be somewhat different than our stock rulers.

• It will be printed on Rite-In-The-Rain™ cardstock instead of plastic.
• It will be an inch and a half wide instead of one inch. This makes room for you to add a personalized label on each side.

In the future, I'm working on a page that will allow you to create even more customized rulers. You'll be able to choose from 17 different measurement scales on each of the four long edges. You'll be able to combine multiple scales on a single ruler.

Custom Declination Reference Sheets

June 2017

As a first step in being able to provide customized tools, I am pleased to announce that we are now making customized declination reference sheets. Input you zip code our your latitude and longitude, and you north reference preferences, and we'll make you a reference sheet showing the current magnetic declination, the grid variance, and instructions for compass set up, converting bearings between different north references and plotting bearings onto your map. We are printing these sheets on Rite-In-The-Rain paper so they will stand up to field use.

Currently we are including a free declination reference sheet, with every domestic order. We're basing the location for the sheet on the shipping zip code.

If you want a tool for a different location, or for north reference preferences that differ from our default selection, you can design you own declination reference sheet.

Redesigned Web Site and New Content

November 2013

We hope you like the new look and feel. But more important we hope we have made things easier to find. We have done a lot of work on our product images and descriptions to give you an even better idea of what they can do and how they work. In the process, we fixed a ton of spelling and grammar stuff. But I'm a computer science guy, not an english major, so I'm sure we missed more than a few.

There is a new tutorial on North References for Navigating with a Map, Compass and GPS.

Much of the hard work is under the hood. We've ripped out a lot of crufty html code that caused grief for various browsers. We put in an engine that should allow for lots of future innovation that we already have in the pipeline. Next up we'll be working on the shopping cart. We plan to support a more flexible pricing structure for folks that are buying tools for their entire team.

We are also taking the baby steps towards fully customizable tools. More and more often the best map of the area, is not published by USGS. And more often than not is in a scale that the cartographer chose to fit the area onto the paper, with no need to match the scales of an entire map series.

New 1:24,000 Scale Slot Style Tools

A "pocket sized" and a "credit card sized" tool with a 1:24,000 slot ruler are new additions to our product line. Both feature a band of opaque white to make reading and finding the tool easier.
UTMSlot24
UTM-SC24

Improvements to the
Improved Military Style UTM/MGRS Tool

We have added a band of white ink the two compass roses. This makes reading the compass rose easier and also keeps the tool from "disappearing" when you place it on the map.
SuperGTA

Improvements to the UTM Grid Overlays for 1:24,000, 1:25,000 and 1:50,000

We have added a band of white ink around the edge of the 1:24,000, 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 scale grid overlays. This makes reading the compass rose and grid numbers easier and also keeps the tool from "disappearing" when you place it on the map. In the center of each 100m square, on the 1:24,000 and 1:25,000 scale tools, we've added a small dot, which makes it easy to read the coordinate with a 50m precision. One last thing, we also added a lanyard hole in the upper left corner.
UTM Grid Overlays

Minor Revisions to the "Using your GPS with UTM" booklet

We've added a page or two on the US National Grid System, and put a "build your own ruler" graphical tool in the back.
UTMGuide

Bulk Packages of our Military Style UTM/MGRS Tool

We added bulk pricing for 25 and 250 of our Military Style tool.

Video Tutorials

Two new Video Tutorials on measuring and plotting latitude longitude coordinates using a MapRuler.

New Products

Six new "pocket sized" reference cards.
Two sizes of fresnel magnifiers.
Map Tacks & Map Flags for displaying locations on a wall maps.