Introduction

Open Street Maps, OSM is a highly interesting,  Wikipedia-style, contemporary project. OSM is aimed at composing a detailed map of the world which is free of license fees and free for any one to use. The maps are constructed on the basis of GPS tracks and routes that are collected by numerous of contributors world wide. For more information, see the OSM website: http://www.openstreetmap.org/

Although sophisticated, OSM lacks a number of features which in some circumstances prohibits the effective use of its map data. Especially where no Internet or mobile GSM/UMTS network is available, OSM can not be used. So wouldn't it be nice if you could download these maps and store them on your own computer?! 
For example if you want to go on holiday to an exotic country (e.g. where coverage of Garmin or TomTom maps are poor) or travel for business to a remote city, then it would be extremely useful if maps would already be stored on your (laptop or ultra mobile) PC and a program can be initiated to view these maps and control them with the use of a simple GPS receiver.

Well, you need not wait any longer, because DSH electronics has developed such a program. It is called Open Street Navigator, OSN. With OSN you can download any part of the world from OSM. Simply connect a GPS receiver (using a USB or Blue Tooth device) and you can also navigate throughout the world! The very many special features like adding items to the maps like Points of Interest, Waypoints, Routes and more, add an extra dimension to OSN.

Note
Please don't get confused with the abbreviations of OSM and OSN which are used throughout this user guide. OSM is the Open Street Maps project (nothing to do with DSH electronics) and Open Street Navigator, OSN, is the Downloader and GPS Navigator software developed by DSH electronics for use with OSM.

About OSN

In order to better understand how this program works, it is useful to have some knowledge of OSM.

OSM map images consist of PNG image files that each have 256 x 256 picture elements (pixels). Each map image is called a 'tile'. With many tiles a mozaik can be constructed that gives a map overview of an area of the earth. The simplest mozaik (at zoom level-1) consists of 2 x 2 tiles which shows a course picture of the whole earth. In total there are up to 18 levels of mozaik whereby with each level the number of horizontal and vertical tiles doubles. Thus at zoom level 2 the earth can be made up of 4 x 4 tiles and at zoom level 18 by 262144 x 262144 tiles. Obviously at level18 each tile only shows a very small part of the earth and thus the resolution (picture sharpness / map detail) is the highest. Due to the contributions of many individuals in the world, OSM is consistently updating images and even in some regions adding more zoom levels.

To a large extent the configuration of the OSM system is very similar to Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Microsoft Virtual Maps and Yahoo Maps. Map tiles are almost identically numbered and cover the same areas! The numbering is according to X and Y coordinates.The big difference is that OSM maps are license free!

In order to use OSN to full extent, some more knowledge is needed of navigational terminology and concepts: Any place on earth can be be pinpointed with the use of geographical coordinates, i.e. Latitude and Longitude. The earth is a sphere which can be divided into 360 degrees in horizontal and vertical directions. Latitude is 0 degrees at the equator and runs up to 90 degrees at the North Pole and -90 degrees at the South Pole. Longitude 0 degrees traditionally runs over Greenwich in the United Kingdom. East of Greenwich goes from 0 to 180 degrees and West from 0 to -180 degrees. OSM uses a Mercator map projection whereby the globe is simply projected onto a cylinder that is imaginary placed around the equator. Some geographical esperts dislike such projections because map tiles never have the same dimensions. The closer one gets to the Poles, the courser the maps become (running up to infinity). For this reason OSM does not cover areas above approximately 85 degrees North and below -85 degrees South.

How OSN works

When OSN is activated for the first time, the program will create two directories on the C:\ hard disk, called "OSM-Tiles" and "OSM-Blocks". The "OSM-Tiles" directory is divided into sub directories for each zoom level, called "Level1" to "Level20".

Also the program will immediately download OSM images (individual map tiles) for zoom levels 1 to 3 and store them in the Level1 to Level3 subdirectories for future use. Thus at least some map material becomes available on your PC to work with. OSM images are saved (in unmodified form) in PNG format.

OSN will compose a map view on the screen that consists of 5 x 4 = 20 map tiles, i.e. with at maximum 1280 x 1024 pixels. Recently a "high resolution" mode has been added which uses 8 x 6 = 48 map tiles. Thus picture sharpness beyond HDTV quality can be achieved with 2048 x 1536 pixels on screen. However, you do need a fast PC to view and use this special feature.

OSN is based on DIY (do it yourself) downloading of map tiles at zoom levels above Level 3. Tiles can be individually downloaded and stored on your hard disk or encoded in files each containing a block of 10,000 tiles. The latter has the advantage that the program will operate much faster, especially at higher zoom levels. Also copying of entire regions will be much easier and faster in stead of having to copy lots of individual tiles which the Windows operating system handles rather poorly.

There are four ways to use the downloader, i.e. by:

- Drawing a block around a city or an area, selecting the zoom level and thus download this entire block.
- Simply panning and zooming through the OSM Maps (the visited areas are stored as you go along).
- Using the "Project" features, which enables the download of entire continents (provided that a low zoom
  level is selected in order not to overload OSM).
- Manually entering the X and Y coordinates of an area.

Everytime you move the cursor to a part of the world, the software will first look to see if the tiles are already stored on your hard drive. Only if not available, will the software download the needed tiles. In the mean time the program will attempt to find pre-stored tiles at a lower zoom level and magnify the needed parts to preliminary construct a map on the PC screen. For this reason it is useful to already have the whole world pre-saved on your PC at least for zoom levels 1 to 3 (up to level 6 would be preferable).

If a GPS receiver is connected to the PC then the navigator function of OSN becomes active. The map view on the screen will move to your actual position, indicated by a little car in the center of the screen.

Advantages

The real advantages of OSN therefore are:

- Use of (pre-downloaded) OSM Maps where there is no Internet connection available,
- Ideal for use on business trips and on holidays, especially in countries where no good maps are available,
- The downloaded maps can be used for off-line analysis and storage for future use,
- City councils, companies and private persons can record their local situation
- and make comparisons in the future.

Features

Next to the download capability, the OSN program also has a built in GPS navigator which works with any (!) NMEA compatible GPS receiver (not just specific Garmin of Magellan units). Furthermore, the program has a built-in Route Planner, which uses an online sophisticated route planning software. The program even has a speech engine that gives detailed driving instructions while on the move! If your (laptop) PC has UMTS/GPRS capabilities, it will download needed tiles to construct maps of the local area while you are on the move.

Instructions

Before using the navigator it is recommended that you download map tiles of the area that you intend to visit or explore on the map. For detailed street maps you will need map tiles at level 12 or higher. It is not necessary to download tiles at each intermediate zoom level, but it does make OSN handle the zoom nicer if you do so. Please never download too many tiles because this will overload the OSM servers. A couple of thousand should be enough.

How to select an area (block)
The best way is to draw a block on the main map around the area that you wish to download. To do so, click the Left mouse button, hold it pressed and then move (drag) the mouse to draw the block. A yellow, transparent block will show which area you are selecting. Release the Left mouse button to select the block. You can now click on the DOWNLOAD button to download and save all tiles that cover this area to hard disk of click the CHECK button to see which tiles are already stored on your PC.

This download will occur at the zoom level at which the main maps is visible on screen. However, it is very important to note that you can change this zoom level to (lower) or higher levels (without changing the map on the screen!) and immediately download the selected area at this zoomlevel as well!

Checking
With the CHECK function you can determine whether and which tiles for a selected block have already been stored on your PC during an earlier download session.Transparent green areas will be used to indicate available tiles.
Without changing the main screen, you can change the Zoom Level to do the checking for another zoom level.

Watch the downloading
You can watch on the screen which areas of the selected block are being downloaded. A small green square shows where a OSM tile is being retrieved. Also a separate download window shows all the details of what is going on.

Which areas and at what Zoom Levels to download
It is entirely up to your needs which areas and at which zoom levels you should download tiles. Please DO NOT overload OSM. You should realise that OSM contains many Gigabytes of data, so you must be very selective. With each step up in zoom level, the number of tiles for a selected area quadruples! We recommend that you do not download entire countries beyond zoom level-8.

For holiday or business trip purposes, you might want to download an entire city at a higher zoom level (up to level-17). The downloader window will show how many tiles you have selected. If you go above a couple of hundred or thousands then you must reduce the selected area (block) and/or go back to a lower zoom level.

Please be fair to other users and don't be a "tile-hog". You can spread the download over a longer period by changing the download speed setting. The "unlimited" stage is very fast, but we recommend that you use "normal". The software then builds-in waiting times of up to a couple of seconds between each downloaded tile and adds pauzes at irregular interfals and at irregular duration during the download process. If you want to download a lot of map data, then it is a good idea to do this over-night.

Below more detailed instructions are given.

The Download window

In this section a closer look is taken at the Download window. This window shows the downloaded picture on the left and any information (or error) that the OSM website may generate while downloading.

Normally this download window is used for information purposes. Although you can manually set the X and Y map tile ranges and zoom level for download, it is recommended to use the draw-a-block function from within the Navigator window to determine which area should be downloaded. However, some settings on the download window are useful, like the download speed (in order not to overload OSM) and whether or not the downloader should overwrite already existing tiles on your hard drive. Particularly with OSN this is a welcome feature as OSM maps are continuously being updated by its users.

At the top of the screen there is also a menu bar. Under "File" you can only exit OSN. Under "Project" the X and Y ranges of eight main global regions are pre-programmed. With "Encode" you can start a conversion program which will convert and insert individually (earlier) downloaded individual map tiles into map blocks which each contain 10,000 map tiles (arranged in 100 x 100 tiles). The "Settings" menu item is important as it gives access to all general settings of OSN as well as path settings and proxy server settings.
Please note that all Settings can also be activated from within the Navigator window whereby CarPC-friendly screens with larger buttons are used. With "Info" an overview will be composed of howmany maptiles you have already downloaded at each zoom level. "Help" gives access to this User Guide.

The Navigator window

The picture below shows an example of the OSN Navigator window:

In this section a closer look is taken at this window. At the top of the screen you will see indicators which show your speed and bearing while on the move (provided a GPS receiver is connected).

Two progress bars show howmany tiles are loaded from your hard disk (top bar) and are complemented by downloading tiles from the Internet (bottom bar).
To the left of that the Latitude and Longitude are shown (in decimal degrees). While navigating with GPS the geographical position on the center of the screen is shown. When not navigating these indicators show latitude and longitude of the position on the screen of the mouse pointer. Move the mouse and you will see latitude and longitude change.
Two more indicators show the X and Y values of these positions, which among other is useful to identify Tile numbers. These X and Y values are only shown at screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 or larger.

Three blue buttons are present for control of the main OSN functions. The Navigator button on the left is used to switch the GPS navigator on or off. The Map Selector button in the middle opens (and closes) a window that enables map settings. With the button on the right access is obtained to all the main Settings of OSN.

Two smaller buttons are present to zoom-in or zoom-out on the main map. However, zooming can also be done by clicking directly on the main map. With the left mouse button the map will zoom in (and move to that map position) and with the right mouse button you can zoom out. Also the mouse wheel can be used for zooming. With the button on the top right corner you can close OSN. By the way, large buttons have been chosen for easy use of OSN on Car PC's and Ultra Mobile Personal Computers (UMPC's).

Now more detailed information will be given about the three main control buttons (although the Navigator button on the left needs no further explanation). The middle button is the Map Selector button. After clicking it, this window is shown:

On the left, the type of map can be selected, in this case OSM. Other maps might be added in future. With "Draw Maps" and "Draw Blocks" you determine what happens when left-clicking and moving the mouse. With "Load Waypoints" you can load any (Garmin or other) Waypoint file after which the waypoints will be shown on the map (provided you are looking at the correct map of that part of the world). Route and Track files can simularly be projected onto the OSM maps.
You can mark any point on the map by creating a waypoint yourself. Click the "Set Waypoint" button and then click on the map where you want a waypoint flag to appear. Your Waypoints are stored in the "MyWaypoints1.wpt" file, located in the OSN program directory.

Points of Interest, "POI", like petrol stations, speed cameras, hotels, restaurants etc. can also be shown on the maps. To do so, download TomTom-compatible ".ov2" POI files or Garmin, Magellan or other ".csv" files. A good website to find POI's is "POI Place": http://poiplace.oabsoftware.nl/
You must store these ov2 and/or csv files in the correct country of the (10) POI sub directories under the OSN program directory. Don't forget to also download and save the corresponding BMP mini-bitmap!

Each of the (10) countries can be selected after pressing the "SHOW POI" button. In a subsequent window more precise POI selections should be done:

The Settings button opens a larger window with seven buttons: "Downloader", "GPS-Set", "Copy", "Settings", "Route", "Print" and "Save",

"Downloader" simply opens the download window, described above.

If a GPS receiver is connecyed to your PC you will need to perform "GPS-Set", i.e. to select the baud rate (normally 4800 or 9600 baud), parity, stop bits and (most importantly) the Com port of your PC to which the GPS is connected.
Press the Navigate button to check whether the GPS is correctly connected and receiving GPS. In a text window you should then see the NMEA data coming in.

"Copy" enables you to copy groups of tiles within a selected area on the main map. This is useful if you only want to copy a certain area to another PC which for example you wish to take with you on travels.

"Settings" gives access to detailed settings, show in various new windows, which enable you to change how OSN operates. These are described in more detail further below.

With "Route" you gain access to the Route Planner. Simply type in your destination and let the (online) planner do its work. Starting point will always be your current geographical position. A voice will guide you to your destination!

With "Print" you can immediately print any map that is visible on the screen.

With "Save" any map on the screen is saved on your hard disk. The 20 tiles that compose the map on the screen are thus stiched together to form one picture file. You can then determine yourself in which directory and with what name the picture should be saved. This will always be in jpg format.

Detailed Settings

The afore mentioned detailed settings button gives access to CarPC-friendly settings menu's which are activated with this general selection screen:

General Settings allows you to change whether speed is indicated in Kilometers per hour (kmh). Miles per Hour (mph) or Sea miles per hour, i.e. knots (kts). It also determines whether OSN immediately starts up with the Navigator window, whether the maps on the screen are sharpened by downloading tiles from OSM via the Internet (if you don't have these tiles already stored on your hard disk), whether smooth zooming is used (this slows down OSN performance) and whether maps are rotated into the driving direction (i.e. no fixed North).

A very important setting is "Use encoded (10,000) Tile Blocks". It determines whether map tiles are stored individually on your hard disk (as PNG files) in the "OSN-Tiles" directory or stored in the OSN-proprietary .mpd format. As already described earlier, the latter contain (at maximum) 10,000 tiles in one file, arranged in 100 x 100 tiles. You will find them in the "OSN-Blocks" directory. Each mpd block-tiles file has a 11 character name. The first character is a letter which represents the zoom level. Thus an "A" is zoom level 1, "'B" zoom level 2 and so on. The following five numerical characters show the X value of the block (i.e. 100 tiles) and the last 5 characters show the Y-value.

The GPS Navigator and Map settings screen enable you to determine the screen ratio: 4:3 for normal screens and 16:9 for wide screens, often used in CarPC's as well as the communications settings of the GPS receiver. In High Resolution Screen Mode, OSN will display as many as 8 x 6 tiles on the PC screen! However, please note that the downloader and other functions will not work while in this Hi-Res mode. Therefore OSN will automatically switch back to normal screen mode for these functions.

The Variable Zoom is a very nice feature as this enables automatic zooming in and out of maps dependent of your speed. Please set these setting to your own preference.

Downloading of Map Tiles from within the Navigator Window

Downloading of map tiles should preferably be done from within the Navigator window. Use of the Downloader window is rather spartanic and only recommendable if you know exactly what X and Y ranges of tiles you need. It is better mainly to use the Downloader window to watch downloading  progress.

To download map tiles, first check whether you already have these tiles on your computer.

First place an overview map on the screen (at low zoom level), using tiles that are already on your PC. Then draw a block (by clicking left and dragging the mouse) to select the area of interest. Press the CHECK button to see if you already have map tiles of this area. Please note that you may change the zoom level (with the combo box below the Download button) to check for tiles at other zoom levels as well! Green blocks will then indicate the tiles that you already have.
Now simply press download and the missing tiles will be downloaded to the directory that you have set with the "Path Settings" (see under the Downloader window). Green blocks will show the download progress.

If you want to overwrite existing tiles with newer tiles, then select "overwrite" on the Downloader window.

Please note that in order to draw a selection block, the "Draw Block" mode must be set, otherwise left clicking and moving the mouse will drag the map across the screen:

If you have any wishes to change or add features to OSN, then by all means, PLEASE LET US KNOW!
Our email address is: info@dsh2000.com

License

This software does not contain any copyrighted material and is made entirely in house by DSH electronics. The software merely provides the user the ability to download and use OSM Maps tile images which OSM has freely made available for download on the Internet. The user of this software must abide by the terms of use as stipulated by OSM. The makers of this software will not accept liability in any way for the consequences of its use. If you do not agree to follow OSM licensing terms then you must immediately uninstall this software.
This software is for personal use only! It is explicitly prohibited to sell or otherwise make commercial use of the downloaded OSM Maps material. Please refer to the OSM website for their licensing details.

OSN may be distributed to anyone you like. However, it is prohibited to modify, reverse engineer and/or make any other changes to this software. A small fee is required for continued use of OSN.

Specifications

- Downloading of OSM map tiles of specific areas
- Storage on hard disk of individual map tiles or in blocks of 10,000 tiles
- Sophisticated Pan and Zoom features
- Built-in GPS navigator (compatible with any NMEA GPS receiver)
- On screen presentation of Points of Interest (POI) using ov2, asc and csv types of data
- Ditto, presentation of Waypoints, Route and Track files
- Built-in Route Planner
- High resolution screen modes of up to 2048 x 1280 pixels

Company Information

DSH electronics, Postbus 1131, 2260BC, Leidschendam, The Netherlands.
Website: http://www.dsh2000.com and for software: http://www.wonderfulsoftware.com
Email: info@dsh2000.com

Buy Now!

OSN is a very affordable piece of software. We have worked on it for more than a year.
The shareware version is limited in performance.

Please purchase OSN by paying by credit card via our payment partner, Kagi: http://order.kagi.com/?KLT