I’ve explored the Earth Explorer application just long enough to discover it doesn’t have any application for anyone doing civil planning of any kind. Max resolution is 1km, and there is no georeferencing support in it at all. It also doesn’t support the SpaceBall, so it’s been uninstalled.

Trying Keyhole NV, I’m also disappointed that it doesn’t support the SpaceBall for 3D navigation, doesn’t offer any of the high resolution aerial photos I’ve found on the USGS site, and although allows me to overlay images I already have, doesn’t support GeoTIFF, thus requiring me to manually register the image by changing its transparency and fiddling with the image handles at the edges and corners. Yuck. On the plus side, it’s got a plethora of vector and POI overlays, including accurate local roads, gas stations, schools, etc. This feature will be a big help in planning for Field Day, and will speed up one of the data collection efforts—building a location overlay for our APRS mapping with the local hospitals, fire departments, police stations, ATMs, restaurants, and a few other things that might or might not be in the Keyhole database.

GlobeExplorer looks a bit more promising. It is not a 3D program, and its primary interface is a difficult-to-use Web page that lets you order prints and electronic images at somewhat reasonable rates. But the images are JPEGs, not GeoTIFFs and there is no indication if they are provided with georeferencing data. On the plus side, the company offers plug-ins for CAD and mapping software that might just offer that functionality, so I’ll be taking a closer look at its ImageConnect software for AutoCAD later this week, hopefully.

For now, though, I need to recover from the late night at the WordPress launch party.