[aprssig] New mapping interface

[Steve Dimse]

On 2/8/05 at 9:01 AM Scott Miller <scott at opentrac.org> sent:

>Google's got a LOT of bandwidth.  Once this app hits the mainstream, I doubt
>all the APRS users in the world would make a significant impact.  And
>Google's proven themselves to be less evil than most of their competitors...
>I hope they could be shown that supporting amateur radio would be a good
>thing.
>
Yea, bandwidth, and even computing power are not an issue for Google. As Jim did
I also added a link on findU's page to pull this up.

The Google page runs javascript, the source code is run together into a couple
lines, probably to discourage reverse engineering. You can see as a page loads
that it uses relatively small tiles, presumably the javascript grabs the tiles
it needs, I'd be very surprised if the links aren't encoded, but you never know
with Google. Encoded ot not, this provides some interesting possibilities.

There are no terms of service I can find, so it seems like at least for now
anything is fair game.

First use would be to write a geo generator that grabs the tiles for a map and
generates an image file/geo file pair for use by Xastir, WinAPRS, findU, and
others.

Second and more interesting would be to modify the source code to plot APRS
position directly on top of the page, giving access to the rather cool scrolling
action in the javascript.

Any javascript experts out there?

Steve K4HG