Many of Sunriver's atlases have TaiPower grids included.
Taiwan Power Company's boxes and poles are marked with coordinate numbers, and Sunriver put them on the map for you, the reader, to find your position. As an example, you see a pole labeled A1234 BC5678. This means your X coordinate is 12B, your Y coordinate 34C. On the map however, you only see the two grid lines at 11C and 12E, spaced 1 km apart. We have not marked the intervening grids 11D 11E 11F 11G 11H 12A 12B 12C 12D, each 100 meters apart. Your X position is thus 300 meters west of grid line 12E. Likewise, on the map you only see the Y grids 34A and 36A, 1 km apart. We have not shown the intervening 34B 34C 34D 34E 35A 35B 35C 35D 35E, each 100 meters apart. Your Y position is thus 200 meters north of grid line 34A. (Have you noticed with the X coordinate, the letter cycles from A to H, whereas for Y, it only cycles A to E.)
I discovered that if I just concerned myself with the first part, of a TaiPower grid, e.g. "G8150", carrying Sunriver's atlas, I am able to get my location to a 800 x 500 m region in about 2 seconds, which is all one needs when on vacation!
For pages that lack TaiPower grid values, one can copy them over from pages that have them.
Formosa Complete Road Atlas (1:50000) Quiz answers:
Complete Atlas thru 2nd edition Tainan County map vertical coordinates jump 100 km.
YT67251000275000
For all maps published before November, 2003 Penghu's horizontal coordinates should start at 275000, not 251000. Subtract 30 from each Taipower grid value, e.g. 71C becomes 41C. In North Island 2nd edition map 63, one must still change the little T67 in the upper right corner from 251000 to 275000.
2001 edition of the Complete Atlas, north book: on map 34 for the electric grid east-west value, please use those of map 28. P.120 small Taiwan map's top line should be 150 250 350.
South 2005 edition OK.
In the 2001 edition of the South Atlas, the coordinates of the Gaoxiong street map have several errors, Miaoli county one too.
There is no Taipower grid region labeled "I". Second editions already OK
Diaoyutai's latitude should have 7 minutes added. The TM coordinate net values however are correct.
Taipei Photomap Atlas coordinates: Strong National Security scrutiny odor. Not only are there phony forests, coordinate values must be added by hand. Hope future editions add a street name index. Source code.
Sunriver's Jinmen grid is not Taipower grid for Jinmen, so Sunriver does not add the values. However, we can still guess them.
As of Spring 2004 no substantial atlas of Taiwan with romanization has been made yet. A dilemma for the makers is Taiwan's romanization (pinyin) mess.
If I were a publisher, I would automatically add pinyin to each Chinese character, and make a limited press run of these bilingual atlases. Even though Hanyu Pinyin may not be the official romanization of parts of Taiwan, convenience of us many Hanyu Pinyin users is more important than any fly-by-night Taiwan government policies.
Even though the atlases are in Chinese, the pole codes aren't. So, in theory, one still can navigate "participating areas" of Taiwan (areas where the power company has hung newer pole plates) this way without being a Chinese whiz.
Sunriver's address in English: 1F 7 LANE 184 DATONG RD SEC 2; XIZHI 221 TAIWAN. TEL:+886-2-26473143 FAX:+886-2-2647-3282. Xizhi is the first city east of Taibei.
Of course one doesn't necessarily need to buy this atlas. One can always add TaiPower grid values to a map's existing TWD67 grid with a pencil, etc.
Taipower grids are open information.
Dan JacobsonLast modified: 2008-08-21 09:07:44 +0800