[Xastir] An Xastir story

[Tom Hayward]

Data can be plotted to GoogleEarth with KML. I've never tried loading
data from an archive (like from a balloon launch), but I put together
a script the other day to grab positions from the APRS World database
(APRS-IS data). Below is the message I sent to aprssig about it. If
you open the kml file it generates in a text editor, you'll see the
basic format--pretty simple. More information is available here:
http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/

Tom KD7LXL

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Hayward <tom at tomh.us>
Date: Jun 2, 2007 2:41 PM
Subject: Re: [aprssig] db.aprsworl google earth link
To: vk4tec at people.net.au, TAPR APRS Mailing List <aprssig at lists.tapr.org>

I reproduced this script with a couple extra features.

You can request up to 20 calls, separated by commas.

'az' can be specified in the url, but if not will use the station's
heading (you see what they see). If there is no station heading, it
defaults to 0.

'tilt' can be specified in the url, but will default to 20 if not specified.

'range' can be specified in the url, but will deafult to 365 if not
specified. I haven't looked up the kml spec, so I'm not sure what unit
this is, maybe meters.

Note: the "fly-to" az, tilt, and range work only when a single call is
used. With multiple calls, Google Earth zooms back far enough to show
all of them.

You can access this script here:
http://tomh.us/webdev/aprskml.php?call=kd7lxl&az=60&tilt=60&range=10000
and you can access the source here:
http://tomh.us/webdev/aprskml.zip

I neglected to include my username and password for the APRS World
database in the source. I don't have permission to create accounts, so
I'm not going to distribute them either.

One thing I didn't know how to do was convert APRS symbol tables to
kml icons. If someone can enlighten me on this process, I'll add it to
the script.

73

Tom KD7LXL

On 6/6/07, Bernard Michael Tyers <bernard.tyers at gmail.com> wrote:
> ps: how did you get the waypoints plotted on GoogleEarth? Was that
> manually done?