[Xastir] Line of sight

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Rob Campbell wrote:

> I have used Xastir off and on for a few years now.  I haven't used the
> most recent versions yet, so I don't know what the new features are.  Is
> there currently any way to calculate line of sight when using
> topographic or DEM maps?  If not, how hard would it be to add this feature?

No, we can't do it.

Topographic maps don't give you this information in any
machine-readable manner.  You'd have to go to DEM data to get it.

I haven't looked into it, but I would imagine you could read in DEM
data, compute which cells the line crosses and generate a profile
from that.  It doesn't sound all that difficult to do.  I believe
the GDAL/OGR library has support for DEM data (I think in the GDAL
portion), so we could certainly support it given enough time/desire
to do so.  GDAL support in Xastir needs more work yet.


> It's a little off topic, but are there any Linux programs that can do
> this?

I'm not aware of any, but I haven't looked for this particular
feature either.

There are programs out that that give you radio coverage, they'll
probably also give you the kind of info you're looking for.

Radio Mobile, Windows:
    http://www.cplus.org/rmw/english1.html

Splat!, Linux:
    http://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/splat.html

-
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