On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Mike Werner wrote:
> You're talking about downloadable topographic information? If so:
> http://edc.usgs.gov/doc/edchome/ndcdb/ndcdb.html
> The USGS has available a file type called DEM (Digital Elevation Model)
> that can be used to generate topo maps. Dad uses 'em all the time - but
> he uses Windoze. I do remember seeing some Linux stuff that could use
> DEM's - kept meaning to grab one and give it a whirl.
>
> There's a few other file types available on that site as well - but I
> don't know what they are. I can try and pick Dad's brain about 'em
> next chance I get, if this seems to be the type of thing you're looking
> for.
You might also want to check in with your local municipalities.
I work for Martin County, Florida and I believe (not sure, I'm a network
guy not a GIS guy) our GIS datasets include 1ft/pixel raster topo for the
entire county. We also have other useful data for our county, like FCC
data for tower locations and assoiated info.
Such localized data would be good for high speed, short distance stuff
providing it's of sufficent accuracy.
It would be intresting to see someone code a module for Grass for doing
propragation studies.
Such computation used to be impossible without supercomputers, but I
imageine that with systems today, it wouldn't be outside of the reach of a
highend desktop. (I say this, as I'm sitting at an Athlon 550 training a
vector-quantization codebook on a 450MB dataset for the vorbis audio
coder :) )..
