I’m of course installing everything but the French–Canadian dictionary. I’m also changing the text editor from Notepad.exe to up.exe—the SC Unipad Unicode text editor I own. Interestingly, the other choices include Excel, Mozilla, Notepad, Winword, and Wordpad.

While I’m waiting for the install to finish, I think I’ll fire up iTunes and listen to some Billy Joel…

Happily, no reboot is required when the installation is complete. However, the Activation dialog is disfigured. The pretty image on the left partially obscures the text and radio buttons, until you mouse over the radio buttons, whereupon they become visible, and partially obscure the pretty image. I’m betting this problem is a result of me having calibrated my display size (see future posting):

Other than that, everything went smoothly.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but the most recent version of AutoCAD I have installed is 2000. No, not even 2000i—just AutoCAD 2000. Theoretically, I should upgrade my installation and migrate the settings, but since I don’t really have much in the way of customized settings, I’d rather just installe 2005 fresh, so that my commentary here is unecumbered by any historical cruft. So, I must first uninstall the old ACAD…

So far, Windows has asked my permission to remove several “unused” DLLs. I missed writing down the first one, but the others are: ACADFICN.DLL, MTSTACK.EXE, iecalswr70.dll, ieflicwr70.dll, iepcxwr70.dll, iepngwr70.dll, ietgawr70.dll, ietiffwr70.dll, iebmpwr70.dll, ac1st15.dll, atlast15.dll, iejfifwr70.dll, ShareDBENU.dll, axENUres.dll, ierlcrw70.dll, ofst42.dll, adsk42.dll, blnd42.dll, bool42.dll, cstr42.dll, covr42.dll, eulr42.dll, fct42.dll, intr42.dll, ieig4rd70.dll, lop42.dll, iespotrd70.dll, oper42.dll, rem42.dll, shl42.dll, spline42.dll, swp42.dll, crt142.dll, ShareDB15.dll, achapi15.dbx, dboleutl15.dll, crt242.dll, kern42.dll, iecalsrd70.dll, acismENU.dll, acutil15.dll, acrx15.dll, acdb15.dll, acIsmObj15.dbx, and evidently many more. Let’s hope none of them are needed by other stuff I have installed, because I’m going to let Windows kill ’em all.

And of course, I have to reboot to finish the uninstall.

After conducting some initial tests for the mapping project with AutoCAD 2000, I can finally get a real start on the project (and this site) now that my promised copy of AutoCAD 2005 has been delivered.

According to the label, it was shipped via FedEx Ground, but it actually arrived via airmail. While reading E-mail this morning, I heard a loud thud (bounding off the door) then a softer thud (settling on the doormat), followed ¾ second later by the sounds of a truck engine revving and its backup alert beeping, so ever briefly before it roared off, surely in excess of the local 15mph speed limit.

I’m so glad FedEx has saved the hastle of paying health and retirement benefits by outsourcing all delivery operations for its Ground and Home Delivery brands. They must have outsourced those divisions’ customer service monitors, too.

I thought I knew the answer to this question already, but after a little more browsing on the Autodesk Web site, I’m not sure. I already know which civil engineering package from Autodesk is the one best suited towards the type of planning I want to do. I know I need 3D visualization features, terrain modeling, coordinate conversion, and raster support, but which one? It is possible that Raster Design may add enough functionality if I use GlobalMapper for the 3D format conversion, but if not, then do I select Civil 3D, Civil Design, Land Desktop, Map 3D, Envision, or perhaps even CAiCE Visual Construction?

There is no one matrix on the site that gives a potential purchaser a good idea of how these products are related to each other or work together. Clicking on “Solutions” on the home page, then “Civil Engineering & Construction”, then “Planning” and “Start Now”—a farily obvious choice—leads me to a contact form that will surely result in a bunch of product literature showing up in my mailbox, rather than a decent feature matrix or product information.

The obvious candidates for software that should be up to the job are AutoCAD 2005 and Bentley Microstation V8.

However, I already know that AutoCAD’s inability to insert geo-referenced images will necessitate the addition of Autodesk Raster Design or a switch to Autodesk Map 3D for even my most basic 2D mapping needs. And I also know that I’ll be unable to create a 3D surface from the 2D contours I have, so I’ll also be using Global Mapper for data conversion, along with GeoTIFF Examiner Pro.

Bentley’s marketing brochure for Microstation V8 indicates that it natively supports GeoTIFF, but it is also possible I’ll need to explore the MicroStation Civil Extension and MicroStation GeoGraphics extensions—or one of Bentley’s more specific civil packages—to add the capabilities I’ll want further into the project.

As a footnote, I was troubled by the configuration of Bentley’s Web server: typing “bentley.com” (all that should be necessary) didn’t work in either IE or Mozilla; I instead had to type “www.bentley.com” into both browsers in order to reach the site. It’s indeed a small nit, but forcing me to type these needless four extra characters doesn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Now that I’ve got ahold of the primary data I need—the AutoCAD drawing with 2-foot contours—I can now start on the creation of maps in earnest.

The goals at this stage are basic:

1. Combine the contour data and aerial photographs to create a 3D map of the park, to aid the club in determining the best location for our setup, given the terrain’s impact on RF propagation and on public access.
2. Combine the contour data and aerial photographs to create a 2D map of Bayfront Park, to aid us in presenting our preferred location to the park rangers and others that have the ultimate say on what area we can use, and for publishing in 2D media.

It should be possible to position models of the equipment and vehicles easily in both the 2D and 3D models, and all of the data formats we use should use the Lat/Lon coordinate system with the WGS 84 datum, to ensure interoperability—especially with GPS equipment.

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.