DPlot

David,

I purchased a copy of Dplot a couple of weeks ago and it has worked out GREAT! I really appreciated your quick response to my questions in the forums.

I have another possible programming task that will involve graphics, so I
thought I might as well at least ask a graphics expert: Specifically it will
involve a connection to a GPS receiver(via serial or USB) and another outboard hardware device which will feed "signal strength" data to the PC via a serial port. I will then need to "plot" location and "signal strength" on a to be determined "map".

Its no problem to grab and parse the GPS and serial data, but I am not sure where to look for resources concerning the "mapping" protion of the project. I see a lot of references to .net solutions, but I will need to support w95/98/2k/xp, so I will need to stick w/ Vb5/6.

First I imagine I will need some sort of map database. As these units will be mobile suspect I will need to have it stored locally(CD or on the harddrive). Understand that there are both vector and bitmap mapping options but I dont know where to start in terms of a source of a map database nor a good tool to use to "plot" my local data on top of the map.

Obviously there are more questions to be asked/answered, but I thought the above
might be a good basic insight to my needs.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Bart Johnson

Bart,
Unfortunately I've never made it past the "thinking about thinking about it" stage for mapping. I'd start in the same place you have, using Google. Hopefully someone with more experience will chime in here. Sorry I can't be more help.

You might like to look at MapObjects and Mapobjects lite from ESRI

http://www.esri.com/software/mapobjectslt/index.html

Simple activex control