VAF Google Earth

[dhall_polo]

I should have been working on my rv7 project, but I got a wild hair to play with google earth.

Want to see where we all live? Go to my website and look for the link to download the VAF google earth file. Save it to your computer and you can load into google earth. If you don't have google earth installed yet, it's a free download at earth.google.com. I've also added a gallery with a few pics to show what it looks like. I used the locations we've listed on our profiles to create a map of VAF members. The locations in the profiles are no more granular than city/state at best, but I've translated as many as I could to the center of whatever geography the user listed.

Any user that has been active within the past two years with a semi-valid location in their profile is shown. If there's interest on the forum, it'd be neat to push active members to update their profile with other information, like airport identifier. Then you could easily see every RV at a particular airport, maybe with a finished pic. I could easily modify and update this kmz.

Try it out for fun. Feedback welcome.

*Right away, you'll probably notice that some folks are listed as being from crazy places, like Antarctica. It's because they listed indeterminate locations like "x" or "bonney lake". For whatever reason, google decided those locations may as well be at the south pole somewhere. By far, the majority of users have locations that seem to translate somewhere in the ballpark. I also added some level of intelligent translation to pick "south dakota" over "sudan" when given multiple possibilities.

Thanks,

Don

By dhall_polo at 2008-11-23

[n5lp]

Originally Posted by dhall_polo

I should have been working on my rv7 project, but I got a wild hair to play with google earth...

Very cool! For some reason I don't show up, although I list my town and state in the profile.

[dhall_polo]

Put a new version out there.

Found the issue: most profile pages note "last activity". I was scraping that and ignoring anyone who hasn't posted since 1/1/2007. Your profile view doesn't show this field, so you got tossed in the inactive bucket. For a quick fix, I just rebuilt the kmz without check for last activity. One good thing about the size of this site is that things such as this have to pass 9000 test cases.


BTW: here's some data:
members with a location that could be geo'd: 5813 (now in vaf google file)
members with unusable location: 694
members with no location noted: 2427

[n5lp]

Originally Posted by dhall_polo

Put a new version out there...

That is some fast debugging. I looked around and noticed another local who isn't there. Their profile doesn't have the location field. I think it depends on how long ago the registration was done?

[Vlad]

Hi Don,
I am trying to upload the database on my Mac and everything went cryptic. I have newest Google Earth installed already. Any tricks for MacDummy?

[n5lp]

Originally Posted by Vladyspassky

Hi Don,
I am trying to upload the database on my Mac and everything went cryptic. I have newest Google Earth installed already. Any tricks for MacDummy?

Vlad,
I run a Mac and had no problem. You need to start Google Earth first and load the file in from there. If you are doing that, I have no clue.

[Hal-san]

Originally Posted by dhall_polo

I should have been working on my rv7 project, but I got a wild hair to play with google earth.

Want to see where we all live? Go to my website and look for the link to download the VAF google earth file. Save it to your computer and you can load into google earth. If you don't have google earth installed yet, it's a free download at earth.google.com. I've also added a gallery with a few pics to show what it looks like. I used the locations we've listed on our profiles to create a map of VAF members. The locations in the profiles are no more granular than city/state at best, but I've translated as many as I could to the center of whatever geography the user listed.

Any user that has been active within the past two years with a semi-valid location in their profile is shown. If there's interest on the forum, it'd be neat to push active members to update their profile with other information, like airport identifier. Then you could easily see every RV at a particular airport, maybe with a finished pic. I could easily modify and update this kmz.

Try it out for fun. Feedback welcome.

*Right away, you'll probably notice that some folks are listed as being from crazy places, like Antarctica. It's because they listed indeterminate locations like "x" or "bonney lake". For whatever reason, google decided those locations may as well be at the south pole somewhere. By far, the majority of users have locations that seem to translate somewhere in the ballpark. I also added some level of intelligent translation to pick "south dakota" over "sudan" when given multiple possibilities.

Thanks,

Don

By dhall_polo at 2008-11-23

is in Washington state and the zip code is 98391. It is located between Sumner and Auburn and a few miles east of Tacoma.

[Vlad]

Larry I did everything as instructed but file .kmz is all hyeroglific characters and nothing happened. Could it be outdated operating system? I still run OC-X 10.3.9

[Paul Eastham]

Neat project.

If you like Google Earth, it is good for something else aviation-related: preflight planning, especially in mountainous/remote/unfamiliar areas. You can fly the route and see what it will look like, get familiar with the major landmarks, what the terrain clearance at your planned altitude will look like, etc. You can even set the sun to your ETA to see if you will be in the shadow of a mountain when you get there, or looking into the sun, etc. Nice to know at unlit/difficult strips.

It's not as useful now that most everyone has GPS on-board, though. I would have loved having this when I was a student pilot and not too sure about my VOR nav skills...