Foreflight satellite imagery - offline

C

CerroTorre

Pre-takeoff checklist
Joined
Nov 1, 2020
Messages
136
Display Name
Display name:
CerroTorre
Is it possible to download satellite imagery for offline/inflight use?

First, I know the answer is No. =) Buuuuut...

What I would like to figure out is if there is some GIS software (or something else outside of my wheelhouse), that would let me essentially create a set of "maps" that are just satellite imagery for a very narrow band of terrain (narrow only because the memory requirements for more are obviously prohibitive). Imagine downloading 300m width of satellite imagery on each side of a highway (or a GPS track, property line, national park boundary, etc) for 1,000 miles. Then have that available in foreflight to view (import it and geo-ref it to get it to overlay as a layer on the aeronautical chart). That's essentially what I'd like to figure out how to do.
This is really just a workaround to data limitations. I work on some surveying jobs and it would be really useful.

In some mapping/back country nav programs you can download small segments of imagery for offline access. The process for doing this in those programs for a flight that travels 1,000 miles is ... laborious and tedious at best. Essentially impossible really.

Just fishing around for ideas to see if there is a solution out there. Thanks all.
 
I haven't been able to get google earth to be reliable for offline usage. It has too much detail and data to download any large areas and I haven't seen a way to trim it down to more manageable data loads.

And every single cloud based or streaming based service often seems to be based on the (incredibly annoying) assumption that deleting the local stored data randomly is NBD because we all can just find some 5G or Wifi around the next corner. This happens to me repeatedly with every music and file storage program I've used over the years. They're reliable ... until they are not. And then they all seem to assume you live in downtown Seattle or Bay Area.

Rant over.

I have very accurate GPX files outlining exactly the networks I would like to have visibility on while offline. I think this will just take some deep dives down the GIS world rabbit hole to figure out how to download very specific ranges of imagery following those lines. Fun project ... I guess. =)
 
GeorgeC yeah that was kinda my thinking. But it seems like the issue may be that these would end up covering too great an area if done as a single file. And would be really challenging to stitch together as multiple files.

The real best solution would be for a mapping program to allow caching of the satellite imagery for more narrowly defined areas.

I'll take a deeper look at the QGIS idea this weekend though. Thanks
 
This doesn't *exactly* answer your question, but probably gives some useful tips to bootstrap something.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top