Record site location with UTM instead of Latitude/Longitude

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1

Hi, I would like to know whether it is possible to record site locations by using ODK Collect in UTM format instead of Latitude/Longitude. Thanks.

2

Hi, this is an interesting question. Do you need coordinates in this projection to display them inside the form, or in the analysis after submission?

If the latter, you can reproject the WGS84 coordinates in your analysis. If R is an option, see the ruODK vignette "spatial" for a starting point.

To my knowledge, Collect receives coordinates from the device location provider (an Android API) in WGS84 and records them as is. The projection (WGS84) is implicit.

I believe it is possible to use an external device like an RTK GPS, it would be interesting to see how Collect records the coordinates if the external device is set to any other projection.

3

FYI this come up previously, in KoboToolbox Forum as it happens, to which the response was: https://community.kobotoolbox.org/t/universal-transverse-mercator-utm/2993/7

Basically, yes there are established algorithms to convert long+long coords to UTM (see link above), but its not a trivial calculation. Although I dont see any reason you couldnt construct a series of calculations to do so in ODK...