Despite the mostly good weather[1] we have been fortunate enough to enjoy over January and February, I have managed about 3 hours worth of flying.
This is not to say that I haven't been flying, I just have not been doing the actual flying.
Went with one of the other club members up to Whangarei as safety pilot so he could rack up some instrument time under the hood. I commented it was the first time I had been to Whangarei in the daytime... I got that same "WTF?!?!?!" look I usually get when I tell people I like flying around doing cross countries in the dark ;)
And the past few weekends I have been down in the Tron picking up tips on an instrument rating again as Trevor has been preparing for his Instrument Rating Flight Test. I did actually fly us down one trip. Just to help with the currency.
Also, I have been told to consider doing an IR before I do my CPL... as a bonus I can use the IR hours towards the 200hr minimum requirements for a CPL, so in a way, the hours are 'free'. Plus it also teaches you about precise flying.
One stumbling block however will be the 50 hours PinC Cross-country time as I currently have around 35. So I would need a couple of decent 4 hour trips to top it up to the minimums. Maybe a weekend down to see my folks near Palmerston North.
And of course, the exams required... *sigh*... I am currently struggling through the study book for my last CPL exam, which is meteorology. If only it were as simple as
the weather rock ;)
Something to think about anyway...
In other news, I received a new mobile phone from work as we recently moved from Vodafone to Telecom... not really news, except for the fact that my new phone (a Nokia 6275i) has built-in GPS. And a really shitty built-in GPS application which does little more than give you your co-ordinates. Which got me thinking[2]... I wonder if anyone has written any cool little GPS apps for these phones???
I found a couple of things...
MGMaps, which was relatively easy to install and setup and I even found a complete copy of the GoogleMaps street maps for New Zealand that someone had thoughtfully compiled for this application, so you could put it on a memory card and not get horrendous data charges for downloading maps on the go.
I thought it would be useful to get a 'rough' idea of where I was while flying around the countryside, as a handy little backup device. I even tested it when I was safety pilot for Joseph on the trip to Whangarei and it worked really well. I even had the crazy idea of scanning in my aeronautical charts and using them instead of googlemaps, and had some initial success, except the application kept crashing if you scrolled around and zoomed in or out too much.
Aside from the odd crash, this program had one serious flaw. It did not do 'tracking'. So, at the end of the journey, you cannot see the path you took. It has an online service so you can see live updates of where you are, and people have written scripts that simply poll the server every 30 seconds and log all the individual points as you move about... but that was a bit clumsy and too much like hard work[3]...
So I went looking for a better solution. Which is when I discovered
TrackMyJourney. At first it looked like a service similar to the live update feature of MGMaps... but it turns out that is just part of it. This application is pretty much a full-featured GPS system for your Java capable phone/pda etc...
It did not suffer from the same application crashes when scrolling about or zooming in and out... it offers all sorts of views, options, waypoints, routes and most importantly tracking! :)
So then this idea of scanning in my aeronautical maps popped into my head again. TMJ provides a little utility for generating your own maps from picture files. So all that was needed was images of my maps, so I:
- 'Patiently' scanned in all my VNC's for the North Island (thank heavens for the A3 sized colour scanners at work!)...
- Then I stitched them back together using photoshop...
- Then I loaded them into a really nifty tool called 'MapCruncher' by Microsoft Research... essentially you take "your" map and load it into the application which displays it alongside "Virtual Earth". Then by lining up exact locations on each map, you calibrate your map to the 'real world'. In my case, the aeronautical charts have the latitude and longitude graticules printed on them, so I could mark fairly precise locations all over the map giving a decent rendering. I actually had to write a Perl script that would go through and 'edit' the map (or Mashup) config file generated by MapCruncher, as it was just too tedious to edit 50 or 60 points on each of the 6 North Island VNC's...
- Then I rendered out the re-projected map using MapCruncher... which broke it down into little 256x256 pixel tiles, named in 'Quadkey' format... If you're really interested you can read about it here, but be warned it is not exactly riveting!
- As this format is not in nice rows/columns, it was going to be a total mission to stitch these tiles back together to create a nice copy of the map to load into TMJ. So I wrote another Perl script that renamed the files into the format Y_X_zoomlevel.jpg so I could use some handy cut+paste and macro's to generate some commandlines to stitch these back together using the commandline batch processing options of a handy image utility called IrfanView...
- Once I had stitched all the tiles into a big giant map, I could load it into the TMJ image utility, and use it to generate the required map files the program needed... only I need to know the "Top-Left" and "Bottom-Right" 'Real World' Co-ordinates of my image... but I only had QuadKey's and/or X,Y values... so I wrote a third Perl Script that would automatically calculate it for me...
- Once I had those I was able to generate TMJ map files and load them onto the phone... and then repeat the entire process of stitching/aligning/rendering/stitching/re-aligning etc. for the other 5 maps!!!!
Quite simple[4] really! :/
All in all, it has been about 2 weeks of trial, error, head+desk, face+palm, lightbulb moments and extreme elation upon finally getting it all working.
The end result is a fairly useful little backup tool that should come in handy should I ever find myself situationally challenged while out flying.
I have already started 'upgrading' the functionality, as my scanned map is effectively still just a picture, so you cannot search for an aerodrome or anything like you can with a 'normal' aviation GPS. So I have also started messing about with the "waypoint" features of TMJ... I've added in all the North Island Aerodromes listed in the AIP with their co-ordinates and frequencies, so I should be able to pick an aerodrome and generate a direct track to it etc. and even do some basic 'flight planning' if required.
Now I just have to pray they don't update the charts in the near future ;)
[1] I'm choosing to ignore the ridiculous 30+ weather with 98% humidity ;)
[2] Always a dangerous thing
[3] Kind of ironic when you see what I ended up doing :/
[4] See... told you!
