Day 1

I’m going to try and create a Condor landscape (scenery) for my home soaring area (Caesar Creek Soaring Club, Waynesville, OH).  There’s no real good reason to create the CCSC scenery, as it is pretty much flat as a board  there, but I hope to learn some cool stuff in the process, and maybe get one or more Condor Corner articles out of the deal.

So, today I went through the first two video (of about 15 or 16) tutorials on the Condor Soaring forum.  The first one was simple enough – it just described what folders would be required for a scenery design.  Unfortunately, the 2nd one left out a detail or two that has me scratching my head and digging through more Condor forums.  The second video describes how to use the Condor 3Dem software to manipulate some .HGT files describing a small island area.  This is cool, but I have no idea where the .HGT files came from in the first place – the video author had them preloaded in one of the aforementioned scenery folders – bummer.

OK, I have found that I was missing a step – I needed to download and install the Condor Scenery Toolkit, and use its facilities to download the SRTM height data (the .HGT files).  So, I downloaded and installed the Condor Scenery Toolkit (CST), and am now reading through the associated instructions – woo hoo!

So, the instructions say to get the SRTM data from ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm/version2/, but of course that link seems to be broken.  OK, back to the Condor forums, where I found the following links:

http://rmw.recordist.com/ or http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/version2_1/SRTM3/  I also found a reference to a video tutorial (http://www.lurik.fr/CondorScenery/01-Choix-HGT/01%20-%20Choix%20HGT.html) that did  a nice job of filling in the blanks in  my currently quite limited knowledge.  The tutorial wasn’t one of the series of 16, but rather one that was linked to from the Condor Scenery Toolkit manual.  Anyway, according to the tutorial

  • HGT files cover 1×1 degree at the earths surface
  • HGT files are named with the lat/lon of the southwest corner of the 1×1 degree tile
  • The tutorial recommended getting the files from http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm, and this link actually worked!
OK, so now I need the southwest corner lat/lon of  the tiles that would cover the CCSC soaring area, and this information is available from SeeYou or Google Earth.  I already have a CCSC KML file loaded so I can see all the CCSC turnpoints on GE, so this should work OK.
Hmm, couldn’t make GE look right with ‘grids’ on – will try SeeYou instead.
From SeeYou:
  • top left corner of extended soaring area is 41, -86
  • bottom left (sw corner) is 39, -86
  • top right is 41, -82
  • bottom right is 39, -82
So, I would need
N39W86, N40W86, N41W86
N39W85, N40W85, N41W85
N39W84, N40W84, N41W84
N39W83, N40W83, N41W83
N39W82, N40W82, N41W82
N39W81, N40W81, N41W81  <<< not sure about these
so 15 or 18 tiles.  From the tutorial, I learned that I should be downloading version2/srtm3 files.  so I navigated to the North America folder, and downloaded the files noted above.  They are downloaded as ZIP files, so I had to extract them into my HGT files folder

OK, back to the ‘other’ tutorial, that assumed I already had the HGT files.  Now I launched 3dem again, and did a file/open on the HGT folder.  Again I do File/Open, check that ‘SRTM’ option is selected, then I navigated to my CCSC/hgt tiles folder, selected them all (wasn’t sure I could, but it worked), and hit ‘Open’ – voila!  Now I have a dirty brown land area shown, with just enough topography to convince me that I might be looking at the right area of the earth – sure looks flat enough!

First attempt – cursor at approximate location of CCSC

 

OK, back to the ‘Condor 3dem Setup’ tutorial video.  The next step was to ‘patch missing data’, which I did by selecting the ‘patch missing data’ operation over the entire region.  3dem reported that it had patched 19 points, whatever that means.  Next was converting the projection to UTM(WGS84).  Ooops!  Got a ‘area is too wide for UTM projection – use sinusoidal instead’ error message.  Hmm, not sure I can do that.  OK, so I had to go ‘off tutorial’ slightly, and figure out how to reduce the area. I did that by cutting out the eastern 2 degrees of longitude, and now the UTM projection change works

Reduced CCSC area after conversion to UTM. Cursor shows approximate CCSC location

 

 

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