Why you should use this locator-system? The code is short and easy to understand. It is easily readable by humans and computers. You can't mix up pre-signs or hemisperes. It's established and prooved by thousands of HAMs all over the world. The information about how to handle it is free, it's not based on military or commercial knowledge or interests.
A JAVA-Script does the calculation here. It will not send any information anywhere: the form-action is empty. It is tested with NS2, NS3 and IE3. This is still a beta-version. There is still some trouble with rounding: Click in the locator and then on "do it" to test the results. If you dont trust Java-scripts you can download the page and use it offline or rip out the code and translate it to your preferred programming language. It is coded quite straight forward. Or look at the map at the bottom of this page and try to calculate it yourself.
In IRC you can add LOCATOR to your CTCP-replies: The script to answer to a locator-request and to transfer a locator-reply to geographical coordinates is ready now for mIRC (put it into the mirc-directory and load it into the remote-section; In the variable-section add %locator JJ00AA. And for vIRC (load it with Scripting/Load Script and put your own locator in scripting/events/ctcp; see comment for further info). In ircII just add the following line in your .ircrc to answer to locator-requests:
on ctcp "* * locator" ctcp $0 $2 JJ00AA
Then replace the JJ00AA with your own locator.
Further info like an interactive map, transforming other coordinate-systems, calculation of distance and direction and code in other languages will follow soon.
A map of the locator you can get here. The ordinals in circles give the order in which the code is given. The dotted lines are "zooms" to more detailed sections. The geographical coordinates are at the lower and left edges, the locator codes are on the upper and right edges. There is no "world" on the map. I still search for a digital world map with the correct projection. A german text that explains the algorithm you can find here. The locator defines the lower left corner of a rectangle of 5' in longitude and 2.5' in latitude. Some HAMs use two further digits to enhance it to 30" and 15" respectively. This will added soon here, too. But it is not needed mostly. It's your choice how exact you give your location by leaving out pairs of characters from the right side. Don't fill up the code with "default"-characters.