FalconView and FAA Provided Charts
Hi Everyone,I just thought I would pass on something I found yesterday and played with a little while. If anyone has more experience with this I would welcome the input.
For a while I have been looking for an alternative to a dedicated aviation GPS. The requirements are:
1) Must be able to use the free FAA charts available online (Sectional Raster Aeronautical Charts)
2) Must import those charts and automatically reference those charts to the appropriate coordinates on the earth
3) must provide moving map-support on top of the sectionals/tac's (will require a GPS signal)
4) Must not cost $1000...or even $500
Well...FalconView appears to pretty much fit this bill. OpenSourceFeatures
I plan to run this on a tiny, $300 netbook PC mounted in the cockpit with an external GPS. After playing with this for a very brief time, it appears to do everything above and more! It even has what amounts to synthetic vision, wx overlays, and overlay tools so you can "draw" on the maps and what-not.
You can read all about it on the website, but apperantly it was originally developed for use as an SDK to various avionics platforms and training tools for the military. The free version has the military specific stuff stripped out, but what is left is almost mind-bogglingly cool for being something that is free and appears to be very stable software (no crashing or anything yet).
Anyway, something for us geek-types to play around with if you are intersted.
<< Yes indeed the opensource FalconView project is very cool... as for stable versions .. the boys at Georgia Tech are taking care of the its business
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