reply to post by desertdreamer
I don't know about ATS specific overlays, but plenty are out there. The easiest thing to do is to open up Google Earth, then:
1) under lays, click on "gallery"
2) expand "gallery"
3) click on Google Earth Community
This opens up markers that if you click on them will open up a thread on the Keyhole forum. [Keyhole is the company that Google bought and then
changed to Google Earth.]
The problem is many of these overlays and KMZs (two different things) are plain wrong. Find errors is easy. Getting them removed is nearly
impossible.
Fir example, this is my KMZ for the hike up Tikaboo Peak:
Tikaboo Peak Hike
If you turn on the Google Earth Community and view my KMZ at the same time, you will see plenty of errors. For instance, there are two Google Earth
Community markers for the peak, neither of which is correct. Even mine looks off a little bit, but that is actually due to Google Earth being off.
I've checked the waypoint a few times.
Making data for Google Earth is pretty easy these days. If you have a Garmin GPS, Mapsource can make a GPX file. The current version of Google Earth
will read a GPX format file. If you want to create a KMZ from the GPX or even a few waypoints you have in text format, go to
www.gpsvisualizer.com...
Note that a KMZ is just a KMZ in zip format.
Overlays are a bit of a problem. Any overlay is an image format file with the edges being tagged with geographic coordinates. I've made many over the
years. What I eventually learned is not everyone can see my overlays. It depends on the amount of RAM in your PC. There are different sized
"apertures" for Google Earth implementations, where the aperture is the largest image you can overlay. What you are supposed to do is create a
series of tiles of images, each about 256x256, with their own coordinates. This is impossible by hand and I can't get any of the free or even pay
software that is supposed to do this to work. The overlays I've created are viewshed, i.e. what can be seen from a specific location.
This is an overlay of the viewshed from Bald Mountain. You may have to play with the opacity to see the area under the overlay. I use the alpha
channel to create a transparency, but they don't always come out transparent.
Bzld Mountain viewshed overlay
