difficult to get excited about my new Skyview

[Dynon]

So we're definitely receptive of criticism - we're far from perfect, and we're all for spirited discussion too. But, the tone here is turning a little sour. We've closed very few threads, and we don't want to do it here.... anyway...

Axel - you're right that SkyView doesn't have any roads in Panama - we'll have to take a look into why that is. I wish I could tell you that we have a format that we can publish that would let you hack away at creating your own basemap, but at the present time it's not possible for a variety of technical reasons. We definitely hear you though, and you're right that all our customers deserve an awesome experience with SkyView.

 

[swatson999]

BTW, this is a non-trivial task.  Although the formatting might be simple to code up, the bullet-proofing, error-detection/prevention, and user interface stuff can be considerably more complex.

Imagine the worst possible dataset being fed into the tool, and it must produce a valid output file...and then code for that case.

You not only don't understand my intentions, but you seem to have no background in producing maps for GPS devices. Go and modify some Garmin maps for your personal edification and you will understand what I am talking about.

a) my proposal is that Dynon let me overlay/modify/produce the basemap for my area (base_map_south-america_6.dup) for my personal use.

b) If I see rubbish on the map screen, that's my problem, Dynon will say: "load our map, Axel, you will not see anything useful in your area, but at least you get no rubbish."

c) I am ready to send my map to Seattle (or wherever they are) and they decide to use my data or not.
At no cost and without any obligation for maintenance, of course.

Here comes your ignorance regarding map data in: There is no maintenance for a polyline called 'Panamerican highway' unless they change the trajectory of that road.

I may add new roads, high voltage lines, bridges, islands, villages or whatever and each time Dynon can decide to use them or put them into the trash bin - I couldn't care less.
But at least I will see some "cultural data" on my wonderful big second SV-D1000 screen.

Which currently is not the case: the screen is as dull as a TV tuned to a dead channel...

Actually, I spent about 5 years developing GPS receivers for professional (surveying) and aviation markets, including real-time software, embedded mapping software, and post-processing software. I dealt with both mapping data, ancillary data, and ARINC-formatted records for aviation data. I was the software architect for several products, and the lead engineer on some others. I have nearly 30 years experience in software and systems engineering, a not insignificant amount of it involved with GIS systems, etc.

Care to retract your insulting comment about my experience with mapping data?

 

[trevpond]

Oh Steve, what a cracking response, and not at all nasty, just the truth.

regards as always


Trev ;D ;D

 

[Langdon]

Hello,

I'm a little new to this forum having only posted here once before concerning the same subject, extremely poor cultural detail, but on maps of Australia. I can understand the cost problem and only wanting to use free information but how about letting customers purchase mapping products from others? My understanding from discussions with Pocket FMS Australia is that they are happy to provide their vastly superior mapping but Dynon will not allow it. I hope this is not correct and we can resolve this as the Skyview products are wonderful but badly let down by the cultural data. Digitised aviation charts are also available here at a cost, can Dynon make it possible to use them?

Langdon

Axel,
The coastlines and rivers do not come from basemaps. They come from the 4GB terrain file. Please download this here:


The basemap is a tricky issue. We can't afford to pay for data in all countries, so in places like Panama we need to use free data. Countries like the USA and Canada have excellent free data from the Government, but other countries vary. As a note, Garmin does not let you edit basemaps. It's that people have reverse engineered their data format and written tools to do things Garmin never intended.

When we're back in the office on Monday, we'll look into the roads and cities in Panama on the base map and give you a screen shot to see if yours matches ours.

Screenshots are fully tested each release. 7.0 did have an issue here, but it was so weird that once people told us it was there it took us days of testing to re-create it. Once we found it, we released 7.0.1. Please make sure you are running 7.0.1 not 7.0. No other users have reported issues with 7.0.1 and lots of people (including us) use screenshots every day.

Have a nice weekend!

 

[Dynon]

So first some news that you'll hopefully find encouraging. Our 'basemap' is actually comprised of two databases that you load. The first has the water, topography, and synthetic vision. The second has the roads, cities, political boundaries that you'd draw on top of them. The former is getting an upgrade shortly. Low-lying areas of New Zealand and Australia have some particularly poorly-represented water and terrain today.

As for the other cultural data that overlays it: we certainly don't have a philosophical prohibition on using data from non-free sources - we've already partnered with Seattle Avionics, Jeppesen, and PocketFMS on subscription offering for charts and airport diagrams. The issue truly is that there's tremendous technical nuance in packaging data like this for use on a product like SkyView. To pick just one of many of them to illustrate the point: What do you do when the detail available in the map data is incredibly dense? Do you pre-process the data so it's always within the capabilities of the hardware and visually pleasing? That works fine when you "own" the data but not as well when you're opening up the ecosystem to other third-party providers. Do you have a dynamic de-cluttering algorithm that smartly looks through the map data to intuit what's most important? How does any solution affect the fluidity of the map? How about the rest of the system for that matter? How bulletproof is the product against malformed or invalid data? You really don't want your EFIS software to crash. Even documenting internally well-understood systems so that partners can create compatible databases (or the reverse - bringing in the third-party data into SkyView in its native format) is nontrivial.

Of course solving all those problems is "just software". While we don't let ourselves off the hook for not being awesome at absolutely everything (although the list of "not awesome" is getting a lot smaller every day), remember that our mapping capabilities didn't even exists a few years ago. I think we've closed the gap with the big boys pretty fast and our navigation/mapping is among the best and most usable that you'll find in aviation, caveat a few things as you've illustrated. We're working hard to nullify those caveats too.

Michael Schofield
Marketing Manager
Dynon Avionics

 

[Axel]

our navigation/mapping is among the best ...

While we don't let ourselves off the hook for not being awesome at absolutely everything (although the list of "not awesome" is getting a lot smaller every day), remember that our mapping capabilities didn't even exists a few years ago.
I think we've closed the gap with the big boys pretty fast and our navigation/mapping is among the best and most usable that you'll find in aviation, ....

Please, please Mr. Schofield:

The last time I flew with a GPS with a "flat basemap" (no "cultural data", only user waypoints) was some 20 years ago, since then even the cheapest handheld from the "smallest boys" showed at least some roads, cities, railways - worldwide.

When I switch on my Skyview map I see nothing at all, only (erroneous) coast lines and - fortunately - Jeppesen data (which prevents me from getting depressive looking at my bright 10" map display).

I hate to jump on an old thread, and even more to reiterate an old proposal, but Dynon could easily "get off the hook" letting us modify the Skyview basemap ourselves, as can be done with Garmin basemaps.

Why you cannot at least accept user additions in the form of polylines and polygons (see my proposal in this thread) ?

 

[Langdon]

Thank you Michael it is encouraging, and your products are excellent. I believe from my discussions with Pocket FMS Au they are interested in helping with the cultural data. It would also be great if we could overlay available digitized WAC or other charts (radio frequency and forecast boundaries). My understanding of the software complexities is obviously limited given my exposure to developing anything like this but if it is possible in densely populated countries like the USA and in Europe then hopefully Australia should be easy by comparison.
We would not require huge detail but for instance in the Northern Territory of Australia which would equate to about 20% of the mainland USA in area, there is not a single road shown, not even in its capital city.
Langdon

 

[Langdon]

Michael,

I'm guessing that the nuances you refer to are the things that stop Pocket FMS or another supplier from providing a cultural data set for this region without your assistance. We know it can be achieved as it is nothing new and should be simpler than the more congested parts of the world, the free information in the USA still must go through the same process surely? Is Dynon prepared to work with Pocket FMS or similar on this? Given there's no 'philosophical prohibition' then it must be a matter of cooperation.

 

[Dynon]

I'm not quite breaking through here. Here it is in a nutshell:. Yes, it's achievable. Although it's "nothing new", it's actually a pretty hard problem. We actually ALREADY process data for the entire world (just to make sure, you are using the south pacific basemap database from http://www.dynonavionics.com/docs/SkyView_Basemap.html, right?). But some regions end up coming out better than others because of differences in how the data is represented, particularly roads. Why? Well in part, because in less populated parts of the world (like yours), the data isn't structured in the same way as the more populated parts. The free data you can download for your part of the world comes from the same place as the US data. So how did that happen? Because the world's a big place and not every missing road was obvious to us on our first go around. So from there, we need to 1) Decide that there is a market need or customer requirement that we're not filling. This thread is great evidence to that effect. We ARE listening, trust me here. This is now a beeping a lot more on our radar. 2) Evaluate possible solutions, data sources, engineering approaches. There's a big matrix here, especially with mapping. The fact that PocketFMS has data that works well for their particular approach doesn't mean it will port over well to us. Trust us on this. Even reprocessing our current data smartly would likely fix a lot of things, but even that's jumping to conclusions. So anyway, that means evaluating what pFMS and others have, see if it's right for our system and enough customers to make it worthwhile, etc.. Then, 3) Decide on a path, cooperate/develop/integrate/test. and finally 4) Ship!

 

[Dynon]

And to be clear, we definitely intent to improve things. It's just (like a lot of things) more complex than "PocketFMS has a solution. Therefore, all you need to do is work with them"

 

[dynonsupport]

Langdon,

We actually spoke with PocketFMS a few years ago about using their basemap data. The issue is that they license this data from another company, and do not have rights to re-distribute it in a format that is useful for Dynon. I checked with them again last night and this is still true. So I believe there was some miscommunication there.

What PocketFMS has is pre-generated images. SkyView doesn't use this file format at all right now, and if it did, it would work very different from the current system.

The basemap in SkyView is not an image. It is a series of data points that says a road goes from lat/long A to lat/long B. With data like this, you can zoom in and out without getting blocky images, and a user can turn off just roads if they want and still see rivers. The even bigger issue is size. The database of all roads, rivers, etc for the USA is about 21 MB. A database of images for the same area is about 5,000 MB. Storing roads as images isn't very efficient, so SkyView uses the vector method.

So, right now, what PocketFMS has and what SkyView uses is akin to trying to open an image file in a text editor. It doesn't work. You have to go and write a program to open the image file.

Simplicity or complexity of the data has nothing to do with the challenge. Figuring out how to draw the first road from a new dataset is 99% of the challenge. Once you know how to draw one, telling the computer to draw all 10,000 is pretty much free.

So, this is not an issue of us not working with PocketFMS. We work closely with them, but they just don't have the data in a format we can use, for both technical and legal reasons. This doesn't mean that we aren't interested in making our data set better or working to use other data sets. But it's not a simple task to integrate data from new places, and just the will to cooperate doesn't make it happen, both companies need to invest significant time (which is money) into the process.

--Ian Jordan
  Dynon Avionics

 

[Langdon]

Ian,

Thank you for your explanation put clearly, Michael from marketing clearly didn't major in diplomacy. I have only written what I was told, that PFMS were keen to work on the issue but were told that there would be no cooperation from Dynon but I see now this is wrong and whilst it is a difficult issue it is one you are prepared to work on in the future.

Certainly I have downloaded the correct database.

I know you work well with PFMS as recently I had a problem with no identifying information on Prohibited, Danger and Restricted airspace in the Av data which was quickly rectified (although it would be great if more information was included ie if the airspace is activated by NOTAM etc).
Recently I tried to convert a friend to fitting a Skyview system in his new RV, he asked why I thought I had a better system when he can fly paperless with his ipad moving map display, although I told him that Skyview is far more than a moving map he does have a point when it comes to navigation and paperless documentation (https://www.ozrunways.com/).
I have not been comfortable writing under the header for this topic as I am excited with my skyview. As a discerning customer I only wish to let you know what it is I want that would make it better.

Langdon