Terry F. asks:
We are rural real estate appraisers in Montana. We use Magellan Explorist XLs and have one Magellan Mobile Mapper 6. We want to have the handheld screen to be a topo map that shows Section, Township and Ranges not the usual Long/Lat . Do you have or is there software available that will do that? Thanks.

I don’t know of any handheld GPS receiver which can display Section, Township, and Range coordinates instead of latitude and longitude or UTM. However, ExpertGPS Pro now has the ability to display Public Land Survey System (PLSS) coordinates in Township, Section, and Range format. When run on a laptop in your vehicle and attached to a low-cost GPS receiver or GPS “mouse” antenna, ExpertGPS can function as a moving-map display, essentially turning your laptop into a full GPS receiver with a huge screen and full keyboard.

To use ExpertGPS as a moving map display, you’d use the Tracking feature, which polls your GPS receiver or antenna once every second and updates your location on the maps displayed on your laptop’s screen.

To go to a specific property, click Go to TRS on the Go menu, and enter the Section, Township, and Range into the Find TRS dialog. ExpertGPS will recenter the map on the property, and create a waypoint marking that location.

If you are in Tracking mode, you can navigate to the parcel by right-clicking the new waypoint and clicking Set Active Point. On the Tracking menu, click Navigate to Active Point.

You can get the TRS coordinates of any point on the map by looking in the lower-right corner of the main ExpertGPS Pro window. In addition to the latitude and longitude, UTM, or state plane coordinates of the cursor position, you’ll see the TRS coordinates as well.

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Additional articles about Section, Township, Range coordinates in ExpertGPS Pro

A long-standing feature request from ExpertGPS Pro users in the Western United States has been support for Public Land Survey System (PLSS) coordinates. For many of these users, locating and mapping parcels by township, range, and section (TRS) is a frequent task. While online TRS to lat/lon converters exist, having this capability built into ExpertGPS was their ultimate goal.

Tim Osborn pointed me to a TRS converter written in Fortran, and I’ve been working on integrating it into ExpertGPS Pro. The November, 2008 release of ExpertGPS Pro will feature a new Go to TRS command on the Go menu. Simply select your state and meridian, and enter the Township, Range, and Section, and ExpertGPS will recenter the map on that location and create a waypoint marking the section. Locating a parcel is now as easy as locating a street address in ExpertGPS.

The coordinate display readout in the lower-right corner of the main ExpertGPS Pro window will now display TRS coordinates in addition to lat/lon, UTM, or state plane. There is no setting to turn this on or off – if TRS coordinates are available for that location in your state, they will automatically be displayed.

Now the bad news: the TRS – lat/lon conversion is only available for these 17 Western states: AR AZ CA CO ID KS MT ND NE NM NV OK OR SD UT WA WY. Locations are approximate – the Go to TRS command will get you to the correct section, but if you need to locate the exact section corners, you’ll need to do a bit more work. Luckily these are usually shown on the topo map view, or you can download TRS shapefile data from BLM with the section boundaries.