[Xastir] Balloon tracking

[Jason Winningham]

On May 16, 2005, at 6:11 AM, William McKeehan wrote:

> What maps were you using?

2004 TIGER shapefiles at zoom level 90 and below, National Atlas 
shapefiles (railroads, states, counties, urban areas, hydrology) and 
NOAA shapefiles (roads and interstates) for zoom levels 91 and up.  I 
also have some USGS SDTS contours converted to shapefiles, but the 
coverage is hit or miss, mostly miss in the Tennessee Valley (your 
launch area was covered but not your landing area, for example).  I 
used slightly modified versions of the TIGER dbfawks from the 
distributtion (I like solid fills, not stippled) and some that I wrote 
for the National Atlas and NOAA shapefiles.

>  and what did  the APRS+SA guys envy about Xastir?

being able to see everything at a glance - the  position, altitude, 
speed, heading, and report age were all readily visibly around the 
balloon icon. No digging, switching windows, mouse-overs, etc required 
to get the information you needed.  I think some of them had trouble 
getting APRS+SA registered, too, so they had to keep configuring the 
software every time they ran it.

There was also the time the balloon's GPS failed.  As far as I know, 
APRS+SA doesn't have DF features.  I began learning how to use xastir's 
that day. (:

To be as extremely fair as possible, it may be that APRS+SA has all 
these features but none of us knew how to turn them on (but I think 
not).

-Jason
kg4wsv