Avare in Germany

[Eicke]

I'd like to help to add German maps and airport information.
How can I add these information and which format is necessary?
I found only information about airport information format in a blog post about Canada.

[J Forester]

Hello.
It would be really great, if Avare would have German or even European Maps.
On the page https://openflightmaps.org you can find open source Flight Maps for a lot of European Countries. Under Regions you have the selection of Countries.

It would be very cool to have Open source Maps on an Open source EFB that works together with the Open source ADS-B receiver Stratux. Would be a real dreamteam.
Greetings from Germany.

[fly...@yahoo.com]

Hi.
You can / were able to,  Geotag any map area in Avare. I did not test Europe but you may want to see if it still works? TV

[J Forester]

Hello. I have tried Geotagging, but I could not really get this to work. The point is, this maps are already geotagged and ready to use for other Apps.
So I am more looking for a way to get this Maps loaded, but I have no clue how to add them to a Map Server.
The Formats openflightmaps is offering are:
EPSG3857 Tiles
Mapbox Tiles
GEOTIFF
AIXM 4.5
ARINC424
OPENAIR
CUP

Is this anything you / I can get loaded into Avare? I mean, I do not want to geotag data, that is already geotagged. And also I would need to redo this on every new Map they build.

Thanks for your help!

[John W SBA]

> I have tried Geotagging, but I could not really get this to work.

Others on this list with far more expertise might reply, but maybe my
understanding is that Avare uses "Raster" maps. The reason for this is
that our FAA provides free current legal aviation charts in raster
format. The Avare team then does some very complex work using powerful
server computers, to convert these raster charts into the format used by
Avare. Using other raster charts for anything other than small areas is
therefore likely to be quite difficult. Using "Vector" type charts like
those provided by Jeppesen, Open Street Maps, and many (most?) other
providers would require first converting them to raster format. In
other words, getting Avare to work with European charts could be quite a
difficult and time-consuming task.

One more thing I can add is that someone was working on a version of
Avare specifically modified to use German charts and possibly other
European charts. I don't know if that project was completed. If you
know of an Android aviation app for Germany that works somewhat like
Avare, that could be the one I heard of.

I hope this may be helpful until someone with more expertise might reply.

[Peter Gustafson]

Hi all, I took a look at this and it is a very interesting project.  Zubair and I will discuss whether we could support this directly, but as a novice user you may be able to just install these tiles for yourself (given sufficient skill on your device and a little patience/understanding of how avare works).

I just downloaded Switzerland tiles.  From among the datasets available, you should download EPSG3857.  The zip file contained a set of tiles including the following directory structure:

clip/merged/512/latest

Within that directory there are levels of tiles: 10  11  4  5  6  7  8  9
Those layers correspond directly to our own layers of tiles (layer is effectively how many meters per pixel).  (Our sectional has up to layer 10, tac has more dense up to layer 11, etc).

So if you move those files into the avare directory structure (where it exists on your hardware), and choose wisely so the same tile layers exist, it should "just work".  For this set, I would put the tiles into the "Canadian Topographic" directory (tile type 8 within tiles directory)

tiles/8

so it looked something like this afterward:
tiles/8/10
tiles/8/11
tiles/8/4
tiles/8/5
tiles/8/6
tiles/8/7
tiles/8/8
tiles/8/9

It wouldn't overwrite any existing tiles because the filenames are based on geo coordinates.

One these tiles are in place, then you would choose to use "Topographic" as your chart type.  If you were in Switzerland, the maps would show up.

Of course, those files would have to be self managed and wouldn't update in-cycle.

Database population and info required to search for an airport, pull up its frequencies, etc, would required intervention by the Apps4Av team... users wouldn't easily be able to make it "just work" like they could with tiles.

Pete

[J Forester]

Hello Pete

Thank you for your answer. It is promissing for me, that you think this is a very interwssting project. I mean, once you get the openflightmaps into Avare, you have all European countries in as open source. :)

The instructions you have given did not work for me. Althought I did read then 20 times by now I did not make it work, although I tried a lot to make it look the same:
1. The avare tiles are in jpeg, the openflightmaps in png. I have converted all files and it did not work.
2. I have added the .nomedia file to all folders and also this did not help.
3. The Canadian Topographic files are in the same folder structure and I see them, when I scroll West a lot.

May it be, that there is an internal cache or database, that keep track of maps that are downloaded?

I would really like to get this working. Adding tzhe european maps to the MapServer wouild be perfect, loading them manually somehow is also ok.
If there is anything I can test or help you with, I am happy to assist.
Greetings from Germany