Re: Useful line of sight and viewshed calculator

On Jun 15, 11:40�am, obviouslydelusional
<obviouslydelusio...@gmail.com> wrote:

There's an interesting and free online sight distance calculator
called heywhatsthat. �Tested it against Tikaboo and it seems to work
pretty well.

http://www.heywhatsthat.com/

Select any point then fill in any necessary blanks and click on
"Submit Request". �It may take a couple of minutes to generate,
depending upon load. �It will then give a panorama of what distance
peaks are visible (not too useful). �But then if you click on
"Visibility Cloak" it will paint all those areas that are visible from
the selected point. �Very nice! �Should be useful for checking radio
line of sight as well as new spots for looking at things not supposed
to be looked at.


I set one up for Bald Mountain and Bonanza Peak, though I don't know
if the website saves old searches. Bald Mountain is always interesting
since it shows what the base can see, at least from that point. You
will notice the BEZ (Baldocam Exclusion Zone) along parts of Back Gate
Road. You've seen my photos of "almost" Bonanza Peak. I now have a
better idea of how to get to the peak and will try again to shoot from
the top. Probably not with the telescope unless I have help, and it's
tough to get anyone to do these ball buster hikes. Bonanza Peak has a
trail most of the way. You need to leave the tail to get to the peak,
which is where it gets tricky. The switchbacks are countless, but
switchbacks keeps the trail from getting too steep such as the Tikaboo
hike.

You may recall I've mapped most of the viewpoint with SPLAT! HD and
have kmz overlays. I haven;t bothered to organize them and put them on
a webpage. If you don't want to deal with linux, you can run
radiomobile, though I never got the warm and fuzzy feeling with that
program over long distances. It has a limited output file size
(3600x3600), so I think it dumbs down the accuracy for large areas.
SPLAT-HD uses one meter DEMS, though better data does exist. The
ultimate is to run GRASS, but it is just too complicated to do
viewshied analysis. Some high school kids did a wifi analysis with
GRASS, which is what I used as a starter, but it really gets ugly.

http://www.lazygranch.com/google_earth/bald_mountain.kmz
I forget the altitude I use for this analysis, but it wasn't 6ft. I
used something higher since the cameras are on a tower.