[Xastir-Dev] APRS software for SAR (fwd)

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

FYI.  My response to him is next.  Anyone know much about ArcView?

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 09:30:17 -0700
From: Scott Miller <scott at opentrac.org>
To: TAPR APRS Special Interest Group <aprssig at lists.tapr.org>
Subject: [aprssig] APRS software for SAR

Ok, I'm getting tired of the path debates, so here's some fuel for a brand
new flame war.  =]

What do you think is the best APRS software package for Search and Rescue
use?  And I mean in the command post, not PDAs in the field.

APRSdos is no longer being developed, if I understand right.  UI-View32 is
nice (and I use it myself), but as far as I can tell it doesn't really do
mapping - it just works with georeferenced bitmaps.  The Street Atlas
integration is handy, but far from seamless.  I don't know WinAPRS well
enough to evaluate it.  Xastir seems to be the most promising.  I'm a bit
wary of running it under Cygwin, though, and using Linux means the CP
personnel won't be able to run the Windows software they're probably used to
on the same box.

Does anything support digital elevation models?  I'd like to be able to get
elevation data for a given location, and maybe plot contours (and shading)
over non-topo maps.  Viewshed analysis for single points and for tracks
would be a big plus.  3D projection would be nice too.

To Curt and the rest of the Xastir team - the one thing that'd make me a lot
happier with Xastir right now is a good map layer setup interface.  Delete
that blasted map chooser and start over.  Go look at ArcView's layer palette
and start from there.  Maybe everyone else is just using Tigermaps or
something, but I have gigabytes of local map data and it's a pain to try to
display it in any meaningful way.

Please share your SAR software experiences... Xastir's my top choice for
now, but I'm always willing to listen to alternatives.

Thanks...

Scott
N1VG