The NATO militaries use the Military Grid Reference System geographic standard to locate points on the earth. For more information about the standard refer to www.wikipedia.org.

In MicroStation PowerDraft, you can access the Military grid through the Auxiliary Coordinates dialog. When you open the Auxiliary Coordinates dialog in a model that contains a GCS, at least one Military Grid Reference System appears in the list of auxiliary coordinates.

In this particular example, the model is using the Pennsylvania State Plane South Zone, which uses the NAD27 datum. Since that uses the Clarke 1866 Ellipsoid, MicroStation PowerDraft provides two choices for Military Grid. The first is the old style Military Grid, using the NAD27 datum of the GCS. The second is the new style Military Grid, but since the data in the file is in the United States, this is labeled as US National Grid.

Models using GCS that do not use Bessel or Clarke ellipsoids, but use a datum other than WGS84 provide two Military Grid choices, one that uses the datum of the GCS, and one that converts to WGS84.

Models using GCS that use the WGS84 datum provide only the Military Grid using WGS84 choice.

If the center of the model’s range is within the United States, the Military Grid that uses WGS84 is labeled as US National Grid.

The Military Grid coordinates can be displayed in the Running Coordinates field of the Status Bar by selecting ACS Position display mode. When displaying the Military Grid coordinates the grid zone, 100 km square ID, and the Easting and Northing are each separated by spaces for readability. Distances cannot be specified in Military Grid, so if you choose ACS Delta display mode, the error "Cannot report distances in Military Grid coordinates" is displayed.

The precision with which Military Grid Easting and Northing are displayed is controlled by the Angle Readout setting in the Design File Settings dialog. A precision of one tenth of a second or higher results in the maximum defined Military Grid precision of one meter. Less angular precision, regardless of the angle format results in lower Military Grid Reference System precision.

Coordinates can be input in Military Grid coordinates using the key-in POINT ACSABSOLUTE or AX=. For example, to center view 1 at Military Grid 18T VK 34922 45481, you can enter the following key-in: WINDOW CENTER;AX=18TVK3492245481;SELVIEW 1.

The Military Grid Reference System is not case sensitive and can be entered with or without spaces.