Cartographer: flight plans and charts from Aeroplanner

Although Aeroplanner and GPS Pilot have partnered to offer you ready-to-use (i.e. Palm formatted and pre-calibrated) aeronautical charts via the Map-Aeroplanner feature, you can still use aeroplanner charts in conjunction with Cartographer.

Indeed Aeroplanner offers two different tools: use TripPlanner to build your flight plans and TripTick to get sectional charts of your route.

Trip Planner flight plans

Under the "Flight Planning" section, select the "Trip Planning" option or go directly to the Trip Planner by following this link.

To start using the Trip Planner tool:

1. choose your departure point by selecting the type of point from the pull down menu
2. key in a 3 letter airport identifier, navaid name, waypoint name or city name.
   When entering a city, you can specify an optional state by adding a comma after the city and before the 2 letter state code. For example, if you wanted to try Encino, California, just enter Encino, CA and then press the update button

or,
if you are in the weather section or the smartchart section, you can also get started by clicking on trip planning and the planning chart will come up automatically in the place that you were at. (details at http://www.aeroplanner.com/help/tripplannerhelp.cfm)

TripTick sectional charts

After you've planned a trip, then use the triptick tool to get sectional charts of your course out on 5 x7 in kneeboard size sheets.

You have the choice between "Low Enroute Vector" maps (~10K each) or "Sectionals maps" (~200K each).

To get a triptick of your route over the planning chart or the sectional chart, click on the TripTick link at the bottom of the map given by the Trip Planning tool.

Below the trip-tick diagram, is a set of buttons for each cut-out. You can press each button and it will display the 5x7 in printable page, we also include a scale at the bottom. (details at http://www.aeroplanner.com/help/triptickhelp.cfm)

Save the sectional charts on your PC. Right click on each map and use the "Save Picture As..." option.
 

Cartographer process

If your maps are not stored in jpg, gif or bmp formats, convert them to these format using a graphics tool such as PaintShop pro. PaintShop pro can also export color maps to gray scale or black and white maps if needed. See details in the PainShop Pro section

To integrate one or several sectional charts to your maps database, run Cartographer, hit the Add button, and select the map files you just created.

Calibrate your maps in Cartographer with the latitude and longitude of the top left and bottom right corner of the map, using the corner coordinates information printed on the outside corners of each maps. For your comfort, copy(ctrl C)/paste(ctrl V) the latitude then the longitude from your web browser to the corresponding fields.
Save your database by selecting the menu File-Save or the icon Save.
Then, install the Palm database created (.pdb file) in your Palm using the Palm HotSync tool.
 

> ADDS-ON: Cartographer product page