LAST UPDATED: 7 AUGUST 2026
RA Converter is operated by RA Geomatics of Cowies Hill, South Africa, the responsible party for the personal information described here under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).
Information Officer: Richard Argall. Questions, requests and complaints: richard@geomat.co.za.
Coordinate conversion, datum transformation, COGO, traverse, area and geoid calculation all run inside your browser. The coordinate files you upload are never sent to us, never stored on a server, and are not visible to us at any point.
There are three deliberate exceptions, and they are the only ones:
csggis.dlrrd.gov.za, so that it knows which parcels to return. Only that
rectangle is sent. Your points themselves are not, nor their names, codes or heights.
The request goes from your browser to that service and does not pass through us, so we
never see it; the service sees your IP address, as any website you visit does. What it
returns is kept on your device so the same area still works with no signal, and you can
erase it at any time with "Clear offline cache" in section 04.
Reading a survey diagram is deliberately not one of them. Section 12 recognises the coordinate table using software that runs entirely inside your browser: the diagram is never uploaded, never reaches us, and is not stored anywhere but your own device. The recognition engine is downloaded from jsDelivr the first time you use it, which shows them your IP address exactly as loading any other software library does — but never the document you are reading.
Since RA Converter requires a sign-in, we hold the following:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address | To identify your account and send sign-in links. It is the only identifying detail we ask for. |
| Sign-in link records | Only a one-way hash of each link, never the link itself, plus when it was issued and used. Links expire after 15 minutes and work once. |
| Session records | Only a one-way hash of each session token, plus when it was created, last used, and the browser/device description your browser sends. This is what keeps you signed in and lets a device be identified. |
| Subscription state | Status, plan, amount, and the dates your access runs from and to, so the app knows whether to let you in. |
| Payment notifications | The confirmation PayFast sends us for each payment, stored verbatim as a record of the transaction. It contains your name and the email address you gave PayFast, the amount, and PayFast's reference. It never contains card, bank or account numbers — those go directly to PayFast and are never seen by us or by this website. |
| Access codes | If you redeem a free-access code, which code you used and when. |
We do not use advertising or analytics trackers, we do not build profiles, and we do not sell or share your information for marketing.
One cookie, ra_session, which keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary
for the service to work, holds no personal information itself, and is not used for
tracking or advertising. Deleting it signs you out.
These are our operators. Each receives only what it needs, and none of them may use your information for their own purposes.
| Operator | Purpose | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Hosting, and the database holding the account records above | Database in Western Europe |
| Resend | Delivering sign-in emails | Ireland |
| PayFast | Taking payment and confirming it to us. Card details are entered on PayFast's own pages, not ours | South Africa |
| Google (Maps Elevation API) | Ground heights for coordinates you look up | United States |
| OpenStreetMap | Background map tiles (street view) | Europe |
| Esri (arcgisonline.com) | Background map tiles (satellite view, and place names if switched on) | United States |
| Chief Surveyor-General (csggis.dlrrd.gov.za) | Public cadastral boundaries for the area you are working in. A government service, not our operator — your browser asks it directly | South Africa |
| Cloudflare cdnjs, Google Fonts | Serving the software libraries and fonts the pages need. These see your IP address | Global / United States |
| jsDelivr | Serving the text-recognition engine used by the diagram parser, and only if you use it. It sees your IP address. The diagram itself is never sent — it is read on your own device | Global |
Your account records are stored outside South Africa, in Western Europe. This is not a preference — our hosting provider has no South African database region available. Sign-in email is delivered from Ireland, and elevation lookups reach Google in the United States.
These transfers are made under section 72 of POPIA on the basis that the recipients are bound by contractual terms requiring a level of protection substantially similar to POPIA's, and that the transfer is necessary to perform the contract we have with you — the service cannot function without hosting, email delivery and the elevation provider.
Under POPIA you may:
Write to richard@geomat.co.za to exercise any of these. We will respond within a reasonable period. Asking us to delete your account removes your email address, sessions and subscription state; the payment records we are obliged to retain are kept for the period above and then deleted.
Information Regulator (South Africa) — inforegulator.org.za, complaints: POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za.
Everything is served over HTTPS. Sign-in links and session tokens are stored only as one-way hashes, so a copy of our database could not be used to sign in as you. There are no passwords to steal, because we do not use them. We never see or store card details.
If this notice changes materially we will say so on this page and update the date at the top. Continuing to use RA Converter after a change means the updated notice applies.
LAST UPDATED: 10 AUGUST 2026
RA Converter is a calculation aid for South African survey work. It converts coordinates between systems, transforms between datums, and computes bearings, distances, areas and geoid separations. It is a tool that does arithmetic quickly and consistently. It is not a survey, it is not a professional opinion, and it does not certify anything.
Every result this tool produces must be independently checked by a registered professional before it is relied upon — before it is submitted to the Surveyor-General, lodged with any authority, used to set out work on the ground, or relied on in any decision affecting a boundary, a servitude or a right in land.
This matters more here than in most software, for a reason worth stating plainly: survey arithmetic fails silently. A coordinate in the wrong Lo zone, a transformation applied in the wrong direction, or a datum confused for another does not produce an error message. It produces a plausible-looking number that puts a point in the wrong place. Nothing in this tool can detect that for you, and some of it is not detectable in principle — the Lo zone of a set of grid coordinates, for instance, cannot be recovered from the numbers themselves, because the same values are a valid reading in every zone.
You remain responsible for confirming that the coordinate systems, zones, datums and units you selected are the correct ones for your work, and for checking the results against an independent source.
Some features draw on data published by others. We pass it through as supplied and do not warrant that it is current, complete or correct:
RA Converter is provided as is. To the extent permitted by law, RA Geomatics gives no warranty that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose, and accepts no liability for any loss, cost or damage arising from its use or from reliance on its output. Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 that cannot lawfully be limited.
Access requires a sign-in. Keep your email account secure: anyone who can read your email can request a sign-in link. Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been used without your knowledge.
Subscription plans, prices and the recurring-billing terms are set out on the subscription page. How we handle your personal information is set out in the privacy notice.
RA Converter is operated by RA Geomatics of Cowies Hill, South Africa.
Questions about these terms, or about anything the tool has produced: richard@geomat.co.za.
If these terms change materially we will say so on this page and update the date at the top. Continuing to use RA Converter after a change means the updated terms apply.