ILEC SN10 Airspace Support

ILEC SN10 Airspace Support

The SN10 has two "site databases", each of which contains both points of interest (landing, airfield, turnpoints, etc.) for a particular flying site and the preprocessed airspace information for that site.

On the PC, all of the information about a site is stored in an NDB file (see DBformat.txt for the details of this format, and http://soaring.gahsys.com/TP/Seminole/sn7b_sua.ndb.txt for an example).

The first part of an NDB file is easily readable text, and can already be generated by several widely-used PC programs (StrePla, SeeYou, etc.). The only note of caution: The SN10 only accepts a limited set of special characters such as those with umlauts, as documented in DBformat.txt . The second (optional) part of the file contains the preprocessed airspace information.

The SN10 cannot use TNP-format airspace information directly; rather it must be pre-processed into an internal format that is then placed in the NDB file. This is very annoying but was required to fit the airspace processing into the SN10...

The AIRPAR32 program that processes TNP and outputs the SN10 NDB format is available as a Win32 console application (and for sparc, see below). Ditto for the DBC NDB database check utility. Note: the Win32 applications run fine on Linux x86 under Wine. For details on AIRPAR32 and the conversion process, see mapHelp.txt .

For user convenience, we try to hide this business as much as possible - most pilots are not so PC-literate ! For example, John Leibacher's Worldwide Turnpoint Exchange automatically appends the preprocessed airspace information to NDB files. This was originally implemented via a SOAP service wrapping AIRPAR32 on a Windows server and called by John's code. In December 2007, we replaced the SOAP service use with a local sparc version; we couldn't keep the Microsoft SOAP server running reliably so its been abandoned (John got tired of continually asking Stephen and Bill to resurrect the thing)...

Users of PC programs would like this to be performed automagically ! This can be done by running AIRPAR32 in the background, giving it the TNP format map data, the site center-point, and the radius of the site (AIRPAR32 then clips out airspace info outside the site). This is already implemented by some PC programs used by ILEC SN10 pilots.

Download ZIP of all SN10 and SN10B software, including the latest airspace utilities (for manual installation on 64-bit Windows or other OS) here: ZIP collection

The AIRPAR32 and DBC (Database Check - NDB file-checker) utilities are distributed as part of the standard ILEC SN10 distribution. These utilities were updated in December 2007 to ease integration into scripting (consistent return codes), and also to provide sparc versions.

The December 2007 version for Sun Sparc, with test cases and utilities are available here:
Airparse for sparc
Airparse test utilities with bash script
DBC for sparc
DBC test files

Please contact me with any questions at drn@nadler.com !