After making two different attempts in-person to convince the Menlo Park city engineer’s office to provide the PAARA/MPCDRC radio club with the 3D contours or DTM of the paper map that I had earlier obtained for the princely sum of $5, I managed to contact someone in the office that was able to get me the data I needed.

Although I was annoyed at the language barrier (I had to spell “club”—twice), the enginner on duty I was transferred to said she would check with her supervisor, but probably wouln’t get back to me for a week and a half, since the office was shutting down for a week.

I was pleasently surprised, however, when just ½ hour later I received a call back from the same engineer, saying she had found the file and would be happy to E-mail it to me. It indeed arrived a few minutes later.

Opening it in AutoCAD showed some interesting things. First, the paper map I alredy had was missing a few details I knew existed, such as the methane collection network that we of course need to protect during our set up. Turns out these are in the DWG file, just on frozen layers.

Also, although most of the contours have the correct elevation assigned to their Z value, a few contours had a bogus elevation of just 10 feet. This became apparent only when viewing the map with 3DORBIT.