Importing Mapping & Charts - 2022 Edition

[jandetlefsen]

Just been reading this thread, but can't answer because it's in the read-only section of this forum

Importing Mapping & Charts

Basically nothing has changed after 8 years regarding the situation of custom raster charts, specially when you are outside the US and EU. The SkyView HDX is in many regards the best device on the market, specially in the 7 Inch format. The map content situation is not great though. I think it doesn't have to be. I can suggest a solution that could work for everyone involved. I get the point of view from Dynon:

Processing charts to be usable in a situation like this is a lot more than just scanning a chart. You need to break it into tiles of specific lat/long sizes, and you need multiple resolution sets as you zoom out. This is done to reduce processing and memory requirements in a flight-critical device like SkyView. A country the size of the USA ends up with about 30,000 files and 3GB of data for a single chart for the country.

I think this problem is solved by OpenFlightMaps though.
On the site there are many regions. And if some region is mission you can request to add a new one. Content is user contributed and pretty good quality wise. Here is the zoomable map of German Airspace for example. The technical challenge to break it down into tiles, geo reference them and then offer multiple resolutions is solved. I'm pretty sure if Dynon makes the documentation of the .dcf format public or at least available to the team of OpenFlightMaps they could simply offer this as another download. I don't see a downside and it would make the Skyview system much more attractive versus the competition.

Thoughts?

Another example of how German airspace looks like: