Mike Schumann wrote on 2/25/2021 6:16 PM:
On Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 7:24:43 PM UTC-5, Moshe Braner wrote:
On 2/25/2021 6:27 PM, Dan Daly wrote:
On Thursday, February 25, 2021 at 3:10:55 PM UTC-5, Moshe Braner wrote:
I got an e-mailing from the FAA that said, among other things:

New editions of all FAA aeronautical charts are now available for pdf
download every 56 days.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flig..._Products/vfr/

The previous editions of the sectionals are dated on that page at
various dates in 2020, while all of the "next edition due" dates seem to
be today (Feb. 25, 2021). New faster refresh cycle? Cool.

But the files offered for download are still the old, well, sectionals,
i.e., the sections of the country that were covered by the old paper
sheets. And the file types offered are GEO-TIFF and PDF. Plain image
files apparently not.

Of course our gliderport is right near the seam between two sections.
In the past few years I've been downloading the two sheets, converting
to image files, reducing resolution, cropping to very carefully include
the same longitude range on the seam, and then electronically glueing
them together into one image file. (Which I then keep on my cellphone.)
This is a lot of work, and the results are not perfect, there are
anomalies along the seam. And all this seams/seems silly in 2021.

So, is there any way I can download a seamless "sectional" for my chosen
flying area (overlapping those antiquated sections)?

I've asked this before, but so far I have no solution. There are some
web sites that display sectionals on the screen seamlessly, but you
can't download a chart, only what you can see on the screen (small area
or low resolution).

Alternatively is there easy to install and use software that can import
the downloadable GEO-TIFFs and generate across-seams charts? Such
software clearly lives inside those web sites that show seamless charts.
People who use software such as ForeFlight have it inside their iPads.
I want it in my PC so I can create plain image files that I can store
on any device.

Get a custom chart at http://soaringdata.info/aviation/sectionalTab.html . They are .jpg files and also have reference nav info for GlidePlan if you need that. We had a custom chart made for a Canadian Regional (four Sectionals merge for us) and it's great... Courtesy of Lynn Alley "2KA". Highly recommended... I must remember to Donate for this year.

I don't see "custom" charts there, in the sense of gluing together
different sectionals. The image files offered for download there are
distorted, "reprojected in latutude/longitude rectangular grids". That
may be the cat's meow for some software on some devices, software that
hopefully can also then combine the "tiles". But it doesn't get me what
I'm looking for, which is an undistorted image of the original sectional
maps, seamlessly combined. There are online sites such as
https://skyvector.com/ that shows the sections combined into one big
flat world you can pan across. That site does not have the anomalies
that I see when I combine the individual charts myself, so their source
data must be in a different format.

I had a program a while back on an old laptop that did exactly what you wanted. I could open multiple geotiff files and it would seam them together and let you print PDFs of whatever part of the merged files you wanted. Unfortunately I replaced the computer and lost track of the name of the software.

Today, I fly with FltPlan Go an an iPad. No more paper charts. This app is totally free. It also runs on iPhones. A perfect solution. Use a kneeboard iPad mount if you don’t have space on your panel. Add an Ads-B receiver and get free weather radar, METARS, TAFs, and TFRs, along with traffic.

Is there an ADS-B receiver using Bluetooth that works with it? My iPhone wifi is dedicated to
Butterfly vario.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1