[Xastir] couple quick q's

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Thu, 1 May 2003, N1OFZ wrote:

> Q1: How do you determine the tiepoints of a noaa map?  I want to use: 
> http://weather.noaa.gov/radar/latest/DS.p19r0/si.kokx.shtml for my home 
> area but I have no ideas at to the coordinates.  Is it trial and error?

What I did was snag a bunch of .geo files for the radar maps when
somebody else came up with them.  The tiepoints may not be perfect,
but the resolution on the radar maps wasn't that good anyway, so
it doesn't matter a whole lot.  See the README.1ST file for download
sites for those .geo's.  Hopefully they'll go with the radar maps
you're wanting to use.

If you need to create your own .geo's from scratch, you might enable
a GNIS map and get it so that the city labels and the GNIS labels
for the major cities line up.  You can also snag the coordinates for
the cities from the GNIS file and use them for the same cities on
the radar map as the tiepoints.  Grep for them out of the files or
write down the coordinates from the mouse pointer.


> Q2: I have 5 tiger maps that I use 99% of the time.  I have them 
> bookmarked for quick recall.  Is there anyway I can save these maps so 
> they don't have to be reloaded from the tiger server every time?  Even 
> with the cable modem it does take more than a few seconds.

Yea.  Figure out a couple of points on there that you can use for
tiepoints.  Move the mouse cursor there (in the right coordinate
mode for .geo lat/lon's) and mark down the coordinates of those
points.  Turn off display of all stations, then turn on snapshots.
Go collect a copy of the map out of /var/tmp.

Put it in your maps directory, then create a .geo file to go with it.
Repeat as desired.


> Q3: Finally has anyone ever thought of adding the ability to display 
> more than one map at a time?  I dedicated an old 300 Mhz G3 w/ 1GB ram 
> and OSX for Xastir only.  I have 3 17" displays hooked up to it all at 
> 1024X768.  The far left display has my main map at full screen.  The 
> middle display has things like the messages window and incoming packet 
> data.  The final display is empty.  I'd love to be able to display 
> street level maps on the other display.  I have been successful doing 
> this by running multiple instances of Xastir but it is not optimal to 
> do it this way at all as it requires me to run 2 tncs for local traffic 
> and two connections to the same Internet server.  I could do without 
> the Internet server on the street level map but I can't see how to get 
> around the two tnc issue.  Ideas?

You can run aprsd or some other server on your local box, have it
connect out to the servers, and have Xastir connect to it.  I run
two or three instances of Xastir at any given time, under different
usernames, so that I can have long-running instances and test/debug
instances.  Works well.  I run aprsd.pl on one box and have
everything connect to it.

As far as the two TNC's, you can run multiple instances on the
same box connected to the same AX.25 ports, but you have to be
running Linux for that I think.  It's also possible to write
a shim program that would create two serial ports and merge the
data to one physical serial port, then each Xastir instance would
have a new fake device to connect to.

The multiple-map-view thing is on the feature request list.  It's
not trivial.  We're getting ready to do some serious changes to the
whole structure of Xastir.  During the planning discussions I'm sure
quite a lot of things are going to be brought up and considered.

What we'll hopefully end up with is a database back-end fed by
the interfaces portion of Xastir, then clients that connect to the
database to do messaging, maps, etc.  You'll be able to bring up as
many map views as you want, as each one will be an independent
connection to the Xastir server.  We'll probably also end up with
clients for different widget sets and operating systems at that
point.

Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"