Kahuna
Moderatoring
For many years the FAA has been providing approach plates in PDF versions. Getting them is a pain. There are other avenues. AOPA for example. You can log in, go to an airport, select the plates, d/l, and get them one at a time. While nice, its still a pain.
During some beta testing I was doing for GRT on there displaying of NACO non geo referenced plates, I had a need to get a bunch of plates. I also had a need to store them in a particular way and directory structure that the GRT EFIS unit could consume. When I got done with the project, I found the whole tool useful for anyone that likes to print plates or have them all on their system for quick retrieval.
First, a smart fella Doug, has built some bat files that go and get plates. You can read about what he has done here. In fact if all you need are plates by state or region. You should go to his site and use his simple smart tool. This is excellent work Doug. From what he has done, all that was reallly required was some file manipulation to get these things organized and sorted out so you could find what you needed. Thats where I came in.
In short, I took his stuff, piggy backed on it, wrote some scripts, and ended up with a tool that downloads all the plates from the FAA NACO site and stores them locally in a way that you can get em by airport identifier.. In all they take ~4gb of your HD space. No big deal for todays monsterous hard drives. It does take ~8hrs to get these thousands of plates on your typical broadband connection. It will run in the background and do its thing and not hog much CPU. If you use it, I just recommend you let it run overnight. You can get these as often as you like. THey are updated every 30 days.
Much more work can be done with this thing. All I personally needed was to get all the plates on a thumb drive that I could stick into my GRT EFIS for viewing. Since I needed to do this every 30 days to be legal, I decided to put a little work into doing this automatically. I have a scheduled task now running at home every thirty days at night to go get em. Having them locally on your computer in convenient for viewing and printing.
zip package here. Please follow the instructions.
During some beta testing I was doing for GRT on there displaying of NACO non geo referenced plates, I had a need to get a bunch of plates. I also had a need to store them in a particular way and directory structure that the GRT EFIS unit could consume. When I got done with the project, I found the whole tool useful for anyone that likes to print plates or have them all on their system for quick retrieval.
First, a smart fella Doug, has built some bat files that go and get plates. You can read about what he has done here. In fact if all you need are plates by state or region. You should go to his site and use his simple smart tool. This is excellent work Doug. From what he has done, all that was reallly required was some file manipulation to get these things organized and sorted out so you could find what you needed. Thats where I came in.
In short, I took his stuff, piggy backed on it, wrote some scripts, and ended up with a tool that downloads all the plates from the FAA NACO site and stores them locally in a way that you can get em by airport identifier.. In all they take ~4gb of your HD space. No big deal for todays monsterous hard drives. It does take ~8hrs to get these thousands of plates on your typical broadband connection. It will run in the background and do its thing and not hog much CPU. If you use it, I just recommend you let it run overnight. You can get these as often as you like. THey are updated every 30 days.
Much more work can be done with this thing. All I personally needed was to get all the plates on a thumb drive that I could stick into my GRT EFIS for viewing. Since I needed to do this every 30 days to be legal, I decided to put a little work into doing this automatically. I have a scheduled task now running at home every thirty days at night to go get em. Having them locally on your computer in convenient for viewing and printing.
zip package here. Please follow the instructions.
Last edited: