[Xastir] Balloon tracking ?

[Jason Winningham]

On May 12, 2005, at 11:39 AM, William McKeehan wrote:

> Does anyone use Xastir in tracking balloons?

Yes, and it's great!

some tips:

go to station -> filter display and click until things like altitude, 
distance/bearing, and report age are displayed.  you get an amazingly 
useful cluster of information around the station icon. (this can get 
crowded for everyday use, though.)  for chases, I personally like:

symbol
callsign
trail
course
speed
altitude
all dead-reckoning
distance/bearing (only useful if you have a GPS)
last report age


assign a tactical call to the balloon, chase vehicles, or any other 
station important to the flight.  this makes 'em stand out, 
_especially_ if you use lowercase letters.

if the flight is in or near a populated area, choose station -> filter 
data -> select tactical calls only, so you see nothing but the balloon 
and other stations you've assigned tactical calls to

turn on TNC logging.  If you're in a vehicle with no internet, you can 
replay the log file once you get home and make nifty maps with 
terraserver/toposerver/tiger/whatever online sources.

The TIGER shapefiles from xastir.tamu.edu work great.  they're not GIS 
precision (and could be awful depending on where you're at, but they've 
been great for me in T-A-G), but they're as good as anything I've seen 
for vehicle navigation purposes.  I like to use the TIGER shapefiles at 
zoom level 90 and lower, and use a set of National Atlas shapefiles at 
zoom level 91 and higher (use map -> map chooser ->properties to 
accomplish this).  I have dbfawks for the National Atlas files, as do 
others, IIRC.  Of course, all this assumes you've got shapefile and 
dbfawk support compiled it.

-Jason
kg4wsv