Areeda
Pattern Altitude
As y'all have probably heard the FAA now has free downloads of digitized VFR and IFR charts as well as the long available approach plates and AFD pages.
This is pretty cool but I'm not sure how to use them best.
The VFR charts (WAC, Sectional, and TAC) come as zip files of geo-referenced TIFF images. The enroute charts are PDF files. I'm not clear if PDF files can even be geo-referenced let alone whether or not these are.
The entire set is pretty big 4.9GB for the compressed files but it looks like individual charts will be updated on schedule so the big download only needs to be done once. Uncompressed it's about 8.9 GB.
If you want to get the whole set and have a lot of time and a good high speed connection I've attached a prototype of a download manager (well it's a zip of a jar file, forums won't let me upload a jar). It has no UI so run it from a shell (or cmd window) with the command "java -jar GetAeronavCharts.jar".
It will pick up where it left off so it can be stopped and started again without much of a penalty. It did hang twice on the full download, if that happens stop and restart it. I'll deal with those kind of Internet issues in the future. Let me know if you have any problems. It's designed to run as a cron job to keep my copy up to date. Of course there is no warranty it is good for anything.
My big question is what software is available to deal with these huge geo-referenced TIFF images? I'd really like something cross platform and open-source. Any suggestions?
Joe
This is pretty cool but I'm not sure how to use them best.
The VFR charts (WAC, Sectional, and TAC) come as zip files of geo-referenced TIFF images. The enroute charts are PDF files. I'm not clear if PDF files can even be geo-referenced let alone whether or not these are.
The entire set is pretty big 4.9GB for the compressed files but it looks like individual charts will be updated on schedule so the big download only needs to be done once. Uncompressed it's about 8.9 GB.
If you want to get the whole set and have a lot of time and a good high speed connection I've attached a prototype of a download manager (well it's a zip of a jar file, forums won't let me upload a jar). It has no UI so run it from a shell (or cmd window) with the command "java -jar GetAeronavCharts.jar".
It will pick up where it left off so it can be stopped and started again without much of a penalty. It did hang twice on the full download, if that happens stop and restart it. I'll deal with those kind of Internet issues in the future. Let me know if you have any problems. It's designed to run as a cron job to keep my copy up to date. Of course there is no warranty it is good for anything.
My big question is what software is available to deal with these huge geo-referenced TIFF images? I'd really like something cross platform and open-source. Any suggestions?
Joe
