Obtaining Grid-Refs - The Easy Way For All The UK

[Bananafishbones]

Steve, or indeed anyone else.

I am doing a mothing session for someone this evening and I wanted to get an exact Grid Ref. When I enter the details, in this instance it is Little Hulton area (Trafford Drive), the road is covered by about 4 squares, can I pin point the exact square ? House No is 33.

Cheers,
Dave

[SteveMcBill]

Dave,

See my reply in the Moth Forum - hope it helps - if not then please do shout !!

http://www.record-lrc.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1609

Cheers,

Steve

[Bananafishbones]

Gotcha info Steve, many thanks.

Dave

[RachelMC]

For information, here is a link to the Moths Forum thread about Grid Refs that Steve McWilliam (SteveMcBill) is referring to:

http://www.record-lrc.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1609

[SteveMcBill]

Article on Tetrads and 10Km Squares - from Lancashire Moths Newsletter 28 (Aug 2014):

Tetrads and 10Km Squares:

A few people have expressed the wish for more explanation of what are meant by Tetrads and 10 kilometre squares and how these relate to Atlases

Many of you are birders (or ex-birders) and may possess the recent National Breeding and Wintering Birds Atlas or have seen the online Lancashire Breeding and Wintering Bird Atlas. The moth recording is exactly the same methodology (as are all fauna/flora groups).

Each 10km square is allocated two letters followed by two numbers. The first number remains the same on the vertical axis and the second number remains the same on the horizontal axis (e.g. in northern VC60):

SD47 (e.g. Leighton Moss) SD57 (e.g. Pine Lake) SD67 (e.g. Leck)
SD46 (e.g. Morecambe) SD56 (e.g. Caton) SD66 (e.g. Wray)
SD45 (e.g. Glasson) SD55 (e.g. Dolphinholme) SD65 (e.g. Dunsop)

Each 10 kilometre square is divided into tetrads (2 x 2km squares) and there are 25 of them, so the alphabet is used minus the letter ‘O’. The colloquial name for a 2km square is a “DINTY” and this spells out the second line as follows:

E J P U Z
D I N T Y
C H M S X
B G L R W
A F K Q V

In order to fully identify a particular Tetrad, just add the tetrad letter to the 10km square, so, for example, Heysham Nature Reserve office toilet trap is in SD45E. Unfortunately the boundaries are sometimes a nuisance, so
anything caught in Heysham Nature Reserve North is in fact in a different 10km square and in SD46A so you have to be careful to note where you place actinic/portable traps !

For a NATIONAL Atlas, such as the current Macro Moth atlas, all that is required is a SINGLE record from any one of the tetrads to produce a 10km square dot on the National map. So do you only need a single garden trap to ‘cover’ the 10km square ? Whilst this will provide the majority of the ‘bread and butter’ and quite a few of the less usual species over time, garden traps have two disadvantages.

Firstly, they are ‘hopeless’ during the winter months (October to March) for a variety of reasons, resulting in people not bothering at this time and therefore a whole shed-load of common winter-period moth species are
under-recorded. Therefore, it is important to get out into your (unlit) local woodland at this time, probably best
with an hour or so’s sheet and light or an actinic with a well-insulated battery capable of lasting a long night.

Secondly, the garden might not be near enough to key habitats holding different species. If you check the map, you might find the only (e.g. pine wood/moorland/deciduous valley) is at the opposite end of the 10km square from your house. You may wish to investigate the possibilities.

Despite the otherwise excellent coverage in our region compared to many areas, until recently no-one was trapping in SD54 (Oakenclough, etc.) and this was referred to by the National Atlas organisers as a “white hole” (i.e. no Atlas dots). There are plenty of “white holes”, especially in Scotland, and anyone on holiday might like to take a trap with them …………

Sometimes the only available part of the 10km square for moth trapping is part of a single Tetrad as the rest is intertidal or under the sea. This happens with SD36V at Heysham Harbour and what an amazing list of species this “wasteland” has produced, including record hauls of White-line Dart relating to the former use as a sand reclamation plant. When recording, it is important to try and use a six-figure grid reference for most sightings. Where food-plants and habitats are very localised, a four-figure or even just a tetrad number is not really precise enough !!!

Thanks in anticipation of this explanation providing a few more records.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxsYW5jYXNoaXJlbW90aHJlY29yZGluZ3xneDo5NDdhZjY4OGJmMDM5YjY

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Whilst tetrad records are useful far more use can be made of records provided if 6, 8 or even 10 figure Grid Refs are generated for records and this is now simple to do using the tools provided by rECOrd and other sites on the Internet.

[SteveMcBill]

DINTY Tetrads:

This form of subdivision is generally seen as non-standard, but is encountered frequently within the world of recording, specifically for local distribution maps. This form of grid reference involves the production of 2km squares, and so divides one 10km square into 25 equal squares, (see figure 8 below).

To label each 2km tetrad square, all letters of the alphabet are used with the exception of 'O' (as it may get confused with a zero, and thus be confused with a different type of grid reference with a number missing). As can be seen in figure 8 below:



The labeling commences in the bottom left-hand corner, and follows the alphabet moving up the left side, moving one column to the right once the top of the square is reached. As with the 5km squares above, the name of any individual 2km tetrad is the name of the 10km square it resides in followed by the single letter shown above. The highlighted tetrad above has a grid reference of TQ75G. The 10km square can be seen to be SJ75 by the labels along the sides, with all west-east numbers beginning with 7, and all south-north numbers beginning with 5. Any record ending with a single letter could be located anywhere within that 2km square, or in this case within any of the 1km squares SJ7252, SJ7253, SJ7352 or SJ7353. The reason this system is sometimes called the DINTY tetrad system, is because the 'word' DINTY is spelled out reading across the second row down.

As with the 5km squares, this form of subdivision could theoretically be used at different measurement levels, and thus a grid reference of SJ6437B would refer to anywhere within the 200m x 200m square located within the 1km square SJ6437 using the same grid labeling method shown in the 2km tetrad method above.

Borrowed from the Kent and Medway BRC wesbite: http://www.kmbrc.org.uk/

KMBRC - National Grid System: http://www.kmbrc.org.uk/recording/help/gridrefhelp.php?page=2

KMBRC - Standard 6-fig GRs: http://www.kmbrc.org.uk/recording/help/gridrefhelp.php?page=3

KMBRC - Uses of Different Grids: http://www.kmbrc.org.uk/recording/help/gridrefhelp.php?page=7

[RachelMC]

Hello All !

I've updated and ordered all the information on the RECORD website to do with getting Grid References. I've used some existing links and added new ones with more recent information. The pages are gathered together in a navigation as follows:

| Home | OS Grid Ref System | Paper maps | RODIS | GPS | Google Maps | DINTY | Apps |

As technology changes, so this will have to be updated! Please have a look and let me know what might need to be changed/updated. In particular, I have just copied the existing page about GPS as I have no expertise in using these devices. Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Rachel

[Phil_Hampson]

I've just tried the link to get map references and it doesn't work for some reason.

Phil

[SteveMcBill]

Which link was that Phil (copy and paste the URL) so I can check it out ???

Cheers,
Steve

[Phil_Hampson]

Steve,

This one, was going to get an unrelated map ref, for birding!

https://record-lrc.co.uk/RODIS/RODIS.htm

Regards,
Phil

[SteveMcBill]

Phil,

The main RODIS facility provides a mapping portion for obtaining Grid Refs. and this can be accessed from the following link:

http://www.record-lrc.co.uk/RODISCheshire/RODIS.aspx

You can either Log-in to RODIS and use the button next to the Grid-Ref field OR you can just click the 'black' "Map" link at the top right of the Log-in window.

The other way to obtain Grid Refs is to use the rECOrd website mapping facility at: http://googlemaps.record-lrc.co.uk/.

I have no idea what has happened to the link you posted but I will amend the top post in this thread to reflect the fact that that link is no longer operative. Thank you for the 'heads-up'.

Cheers.
Steve

[Phil_Hampson]

Thanks Steve.

Cheers,
Phil

[RachelMC]

I think that the link Phil tried to use was disabled when the RODIS mapping facility was reconfigured to use the OS Open Space API.

All descriptions of Grid Ref tools have been bundled under a set of web pages - mainly for a lay person's information but also useful for accessing Google Maps and RODIS mapping.

http://www.record-lrc.co.uk/c2.aspx?Mod=Article&ArticleID=48.

[Phil_Hampson]

Rachel,

Thank you, interesting page. It looks to me though that you cannot directly access a tool to get map references as was previously available. If I have read this correctly you have to be entering records in RODIS which I don't do. Its not an issue for me I was just trying to get a map ref electronically as I was being lazy and not getting the map out!

Phil

[SteveMcBill]

Not supplied by rECOrd but you could try here Phil: http://gridreferencefinder.com/gmap.php.

Steve

[SteveMcBill]

Phil,

You can use the mapping facility IN RODIS without even logging in to the facility and certainly without entering data. Just click the black "Map" link in the top right of the RODIS Log-in window to get to the mapping facility where you can get your Grid Refs. - http://www.record-lrc.co.uk/RODISCheshire/RODIS.aspx

Steve

[Phil_Hampson]

Steve,

My mistake. The cursor doesn't change when you go over it so I assumed, wrongly, that you had to be logged in. I've never seen that with a link before.

Hasten to add it was never an issue this.

Cheers,
Phil

[RachelMC]

Thanks for the feedback.

For information, we've collected together all the information on reading and obtaining Grid References and put it in a collection of web pages on the RECORD website. Click the link below to see:

All About Grid References