[aprssig] Maps

[Curt, WE7U]

On Sun, 15 Aug 2010, Arnie Shore wrote:

> One - given yr lat/long area of interest and the zooms - is to download onto
> yr hard drive a set of OpenStreetMaps tiles/files.  Time and storage
> requirements may be non-trivial, depending on yr needs of course.
>
> The second gives you the 'slippy' zoom & scroll map view of yr selected
> area.
>
> Now how you can integrate this into, say, Xastir, is an interesting
> question.

I know the original question was not about Xastir, so he's probably
not interested in the info below.  Others may be, so I'm responding
here:

Xastir _has_ support for Open Street Maps as:

*) Complete image downloads over the internet (with local caching),
*) Tiles of images over the internet (with local caching), and
*) Shapefile vector map extracts.

If you have constant internet access, go with the tiled versions.  I
hear the method of caching for the tiles is compatibile with other
programs that use OSM maps.

If you plan to run off-line at least part of the time you can:

*) Go with tiles and zoom/pan to your hearts content to get the ones
    you need cached locally, or
*) Download countries or states of interest as Shapefiles and you're
    good-to-go.

Xastir-CVS or the latest development snapshot has the capabilities
listed.

Xastir is free and there are several methods to getting it working
on Windows boxes (or OSX, or Linux, or ...).  It will be difficult
to have the project die due developers going SK:  There are 16
official developers so far, plus countless others who have
contributed code, docs, bug-reports, and bug-fixes.

--we7u