→ ran vrs about 20 hours over night to plot aircrafts my site received
→ made a profile for my site on heywhatsthat
→ combined all in photoshop
what you see in the map is:
→ centered circles around my site each 25nm (from 25nm to 225nm)
→ centered outlines of theoretical sight at different altitudes (10,000ft, 20,000ft, 30,000ft, 40,000ft)
→ zones of real tracking over the last 20 hours (light-green<10,000ft, green<20,000ft, blue<30,000ft, red>30,000ft)
→ actual aircrafts at moment of screenshot with their altitude in feet
p.s. thanx to user ‘abcd’ for his tips on vrs and heywhatsthat and user ‘heypete’ where i saw vrs plots first
It’d be really cool if that process could be automated, so users could combine data from VRS and heywhatsthat into a single image, or if VRS could use heywhatsthat as an overlay in the map.
probably this isn’t a trivial thing and don’t know whether obj has enough time to do this …
but for now - you could simply do what i did. i took a lot of sceenshots from heywhatsthat → then composed them to one map from my site.
when i have new reach-maps from vrs i just open my standard heywhatsthat layer in photoshop → pull the new vrs layer on-top → set transparency for upper layer to 60% → save as jpeg → ready
this way it was one time about 2 hours to make the heywhatsthat layer for my site - and now it just takes 3 minutes for each updated composing.
It is possible to plot the heywhatsthat polyline directly on to the dump1090-mut Google map. The example below is generated live and you can have any number of the polylines at any heights. In this case it shows the 10,000 ft and 30,000 ft contours.
I’ve written to the owner of the heywhatsthat.com website to see if he’s happy with using his data like this. I had to extract a javascript array from the webpage after it had been calculated to insert in the dump1090 javascript. You only have to do that once for every antenna position, then some new javascript in dump1090 can calculate the line for any antenna height. However, the original code is his copyright so we need to check if he is OK with extracting it and using it.
The code to do this is now part of the standard dump1090-mutability package. I know it’s 12 pages, but plough through that thread and all will be revealed.
