[Xastir] Map/ weather radar question

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 11:50:21AM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <ka3nam at daminternet.biz> flavor, containing:
> I have a laptop with a few state shp files that I downloaded from 
> xastir.tamu.edu a while back... Everthing works fine except when I have 
> weather radar enabed and it downloads every 300 to 500 seconds... When I 
> have the map zoom out to a large zoom level (e.g. 1300+) my laptop just 
> cycles through geting weather radar and then reloading the maps off the 
> DVDROM... Then almost immediately, starts again... It spend so much time 
> worrying about the maps, APRS just gets lost in the process... Is there a 
> configuration that can just download the weather radar data and not have to 
> update the map every time?

Not with shapefiles.  This is the downside to having Xastir render your maps
from dvdrom each time.

As I see it you have a couple options:

 1) Decrease the refresh rate of the weather maps by editing the .geo file
 2) Decrease the number of maps you have rendered at high zooms
 3) Split your shapefiles up by attributes (i.e. major roads in one file,
    street-level detail in another) and tell xastir to skip those in the
    more detailed files when at high zooms
 4) If you're not zooming and panning around a lot, you might consider 
    pre-rendering a static map by turning off all of the station display stuff
    and taking a snapshot --- it'll save a .png and a .geo that you can move
    to your maps directory and use as a static raster image.  Use that as
    your base layer at high zooms (telling xastir not to render shapefiles at
    that zoom), and overlay the weather on that instead.  It will be very fast,
    because it won't be doing any calculation at all.  It will be ugly at
    any zoom level other than the one you created it at, though.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick