Airport rebuilding - help, please!!!

[redscorpion]

Hello
As mentioned in a post before, I want to rebuild my local airport. To make thing easier in FS2002 I made a bird's eye screenshot of the airport surroundings and used it as background in Airport4Win.
1) airport properties window asks me to give coordinates for the airport (lat, long). Which coordinates should I enter? Runway end? Tower??
2) after pasting the bmp as background the runway points northwards, while its true heading is 286 degrees. Should I rotate the background? How?
3) after pasting the background I had a "nose at the ground" scale. I had to tap -zoom to see whole background, but it made the screen grid very dense. Should I also scale it somehow?

Thank you very much!

[thiscox]

The lat/long you enter in the Section/General dialog are the approximate center of the scenery. It's not critical that this be exactly the center, but it's more convenient in using the program to have it about right. This lat/long forms the 0,0 coordinate center for determining the position of all scenery objects.

Your background BMP should have a true north orientation. Airport does not rotate this. You can do this by having the plane facing true north when you take the screen shot (press the space bar).

You scale the background BMP on the Map dialog and it sounds like it's not right. Keep change the scale until the length of some known item such as the runway is the same in Airport as on the ground. Use the measurement tool (rulerbar button) to easily determine the length in Airport.

Hope this helps.

Tom

[b_bonnett]

As Tom said, make sure you are pointing north (Space Bar while in Slew Mode).

To scale the background map properly (taken from the Airport help file):


Tip 2 : How to compute the bitmap scale ?

- the problem can be simplier if your pic includes a runway ; in this case, choose the two relevant points as the begin and the end of the runway. You know the runway length,


example : dist_in_meters = 2000


- jump to any bitmap drawing tool (Paint Shop Pro 4.0 for example), and note the x,y co-ordinates for your two points (each end of the runway)


example : x1= 345 y1= 450

x2= 468 y2 = 780

- compute the distance (in pixels) between w your two points :

dist_in_pixel = sqr ( ( x1 - x2 ) ^ 2 + ( y1 - y2 ) ^ 2 )

(Pythagoras' Theorem. If you are doing this on a handhelp scientific calculator, you will need to include the brackets. Using an old calculator, you will need to do it in several steps:
1. Subtract x2 from x1
2. Square this number and store in memory
3. Subtract y2 from y1
4. Square this number and add it to the number stored in memory
5. Square root this number to get final answer.)


so :

dist_in_pixel = 352


- now it is easy to compute the bitmap scale for airport :

scale = dist_in_pixel / dist_in_meters * 100

so :

scale = 352 / 2000 * 100
scale = 17.6 pixels for 100 meters


Now just use this number when loading the background map into Airport, and it will be the correct scale.

Hope this helps,
[hr]
http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...023c0c01b1.jpg
Blair Bonnett
Christchurch, New Zealand

[tlkelley]

Red,
They are correct. When you take your screen shot, press the space bar and it will orient your bmp correctly.

For coords, I will go to airnav.com and look up the airport. It will give you the location lat/long. Use that for your coords.

For scaling the background usually what I will do is place two lines in airport that are two different runways. Again, I use the coords from airnav for the beginning and end of the rwys. Lay the lines as if they are your rwys in airport using those coords. Then I will bring in the background and scale it so that the rwys in the background match the two lines I put in.

Hope that helps....

tk