GPS Coordinate Formatter

GPS coordinates describe the same point on Earth, but different systems and applications expect them in wildly different formats. A mapping API wants decimal degrees, your handheld GPS unit outputs degrees minutes seconds, a ham radio log needs a Maidenhead grid square, and a military app reads MGRS. Switching between these by hand involves tedious arithmetic — this tool does it instantly and simultaneously.

How it works

Paste or type any coordinate pair and the formatter parses it into a signed decimal-degree value, then applies eight independent conversion algorithms, all running in your browser.

Decimal Degrees (DD)

The simplest form: one number per axis, positive = North/East, negative = South/West. The formula is just the raw value expressed to 6 decimal places, which gives about 10 cm accuracy — sufficient for any civilian application.

Degrees Decimal Minutes (DDM)

Split the decimal part off the degrees:

Minutes = (|DD| − floor(|DD|)) × 60

The whole-number degrees stay unchanged; the fractional degree becomes decimal minutes. Aviation and marine waypoints routinely use this format.

Degrees Minutes Seconds (DMS)

Carry the process one step further:

Whole minutes = floor(Minutes) Seconds = (Minutes − Whole minutes) × 60

Traditional topographic maps, surveying datums and many GPS receivers report in DMS.

Geohash

The Geohash algorithm interleaves the binary representations of latitude and longitude bit by bit, then groups each 5-bit chunk into one of 32 base-32 characters (0–9 and a subset of the alphabet). At precision 9 the resulting string identifies a bounding box of roughly 2.4 m × 4.8 m. Truncate to 6 characters and you have a ~1.2 km × 0.6 km cell — useful for spatial indexing and proximity lookups.

Open Location Code (Plus Code)

Google’s open standard encodes a 1/8000° × 1/8000° cell (about 14 × 14 m) into a 10-character string. The implementation here uses the authoritative base-20 algorithm: latitude is shifted by +90 and longitude by +180, then each axis is divided into successively finer 20-unit grids, encoding one digit per axis per step until all 10 characters are produced, with a ”+” separator after the first 8.

UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator)

UTM divides the world into 60 north–south zones, each 6° wide. Within a zone the transverse Mercator projection converts latitude/longitude into metric easting and northing using the WGS-84 ellipsoid parameters. The scale factor k0 = 0.9996 keeps distortion below 0.04% across the zone. The output shows zone number, latitude band letter, easting (from the central meridian + 500,000 m false easting) and northing (from the equator, with +10,000,000 m false northing in the southern hemisphere).

Maidenhead Locator

The Maidenhead system divides the globe into an 18 × 18 grid of fields (letters A–R), then each field into a 10 × 10 grid of squares (digits 0–9), and each square into a 24 × 24 grid of subsquares (letters a–x). A 6-character locator such as IO91wm narrows a position to a rectangle roughly 0.04° latitude × 0.083° longitude.

MGRS

The Military Grid Reference System layers a 100 km letter-coded square grid on top of UTM. Each 100 km cell gets two letters — one encoding the column within the UTM zone, one encoding the row. The easting and northing within that cell are then expressed as 5-digit metre values. The full MGRS string looks like 30UYC 12345 67890.

Worked example

The coordinates for Buckingham Palace, London:

All eight values refer to the same point — just in the notation each system demands.