VFR Flight planning on PalmOS
Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2006, Thomas Sailer
WARNING! All data is presented for reference only. You
assume total responsibility and risk associated with using this program.
This means in particular (but not limited):
- Always check frequencies and airspaces with your local AIP
- Always check headings, distances and altitudes on an ICAO map
- Always check navigation with other sources (eg. maps, VOR, NDB) and
be prepared to navigate using traditional means
Features
- Preflight Navigation Planning:
- Synthetic Vector Map, with terrain features and elevations
- Scanned Maps
- Database containing Airports, Navaids and Airspaces
- Inflight Navigation
- Synthetic Vector Map
- Scanned Maps
- Time based (with manual "next waypoint" button) or
GPS based navigation
Prerequisites
To use all features, a fast PalmOS 5 device with lots of memory is
required. Limited features should be available on PalmOS 3.5 devices,
although I didn't check lately.
Download
The program
GPS.prc,
Required Libraries
SysZLib
(ZLib.prc),
pnoJpegLib
(pnoJpegLib.prc)
The source code
The source code pilot_gps-20060829.tar.bz2 is
released under the GNU
General Public License, GPL, Version 2.
In order to compile the program, you need
prc-tools 2.2,
pilrc 2.9p2
and 3.0b2,
palmos-sdk 5.0.
The databases
The tools to generate the databases on Linux are included in the source
code. The data itself is taken from the following publicly available
data sources:
- Large Airports (longest runway at least 1km long),
Navaids, Airspaces from
DAFIFT
Ed. 7
- Small Airfields from Michael Meier's
WELT2000.TXT
database
- Map elements from Vector Map Level 0
- Elevation data from
GTopo30
GTopoDB.pdb (covered area: N40-N60, E5-E20)
MapelementDB.pdb (covered area: N40-N60, E5-E20)
This product was developed using DAFIF, a product of the National
Imagery and Mapping Agency.
This product has not been endorsed or otherwise approved by the National
Imagery and Mapping Agency, or the United States Department of Defense
(10 U.S.C. 425).
Caveats
- DAFIF prefers military ICAO airport designators over civil ones,
so check the ICAO designators, especially on colocated CIV/MIL airports
(I fell into this trap in Klagenfurt, Austria)
- Due to the change to the ARM optimized pnoJpeg library, scanned maps
are now displayed with acceptable speed.
- Scanned maps may reside on an external MMC Flash Card (in the
directory "PALM/Launcher"), all other databases must
be in main memory