[Xastir] Maps, Maps, Maps

[KK6RW]

Hello all,

    Thank you for all your responses. I've consolidated them into a joint 
response back to the group.

Dan wrote:

>>Not currently, but it is one thing I had thought about, at one point in
time.  What I would recommend doing is saving some 'bookmarks' using the
"map display bookmark" menu option for the views you like - the maps are
cached automatically and, when you go back to the bookmark, will be loaded
from the cache, rather than hitting the 'net.  This saves having to
manually manage the mapfiles.  Having the .geo files generated at the same
time the maps are saved, and or generated off of the URL's saved in the
database might be something for the future.

    Your suggestion of saving bookmark views works well. I've done that now 
for a number of anticipated views which has worked fine. Perhaps the feature 
you alluded to and which Curt expounded, would be something for the future. 
It would be great to have the various Tiger maps for areas of interest 
available with zoom capability.
    I do have one annoying problem. When trying to zoom out to the 200 mile 
range / 8192K, I wait 5 or more minutes and then no map appears. I then zoom 
out to 500 Mile range/ 16K and I get all of continental US. I've got the 
timeout set out as far as possible but no go at any area of the Tiger map 
display area.

J. Lance Cotton, KJ5O wrote:

>>Only by changing the source code. HOWEVER, if you're using the feature
just to create snapshot maps w/ .geos, then you can toggle the snapshot
function off and then on again and it will immediately kick out a new
snapshot.

    I've also played with this method which works good too. I've got a set 
of static maps made up now.

Curt wrote:

>>We already have code in the Snapshots feature to do that, so if you
wanted to add it in, it'd be easy.

It'd be nice to add a feature someday where you could specify a
bounding rectangle and a zoom, and Xastir would iterate over that
area snagging a Tigermap for each tile and creating images and .geo
files for each one.  That wouldn't be all that hard to do but would
allow auto-creation of an offline set of maps.

For that matter, don't specify the zoom, but just the area of
interest, then have Xastir snag these maps for multiple zoom levels
and set up the map level properly for each set as well in the map
index.

    I'd certainly volunteer to do this but I haven't the vaguest notion of 
where to start -- hi hi

Jerry wrote:

>>I have had good luck using map layers to have other maps "peep" through 
>>Tiger maps.

    I haven't played much with map layers, there's another way thing to 
explore.


    Thanks for all the suggestions and help everyone. I appreciate it. I'm 
sure having fun with Xastir, even though it can be frustrating at times but 
then it's usually cockpit error ;-)

Randy Whitney - KK6RW