Some improvements to my Airport Information website

As I previously announced (see my posting on April 1), I have built a
little website that publishes US airport information that has been
extracted from the FAA's National Airspace System Resource
subscription files. The site supports several different output
formats including SeeYou .CUP, Cambridge Aero .DAT, and .NDB for the
SN-10. You can also find some hints there for using the data in
Volksloggers and generic Garmin GPS units.

You can access my site at http://www.xmission.com/~lalley/aviation.

Since I did the original implementation, I've made several
improvements:

1. User-selectable lengths for short names in the output file. This
should be especially useful for Garmin GPS devices, different models
of which support different turnpoint name lengths.

2. A proximity search, so that you can use an input turnpoint file
that doesn't contain the IATA ID codes. If an airport turnpoint in
the input file is very close to one in the FAA's database, they are
assumed to be the same.

3. Support for tab-delimited input files that don't contain the full
complement of columns. As long as the input file follows the correct
tab-delimited format and specifies at least the names and geographic
coordinates of the turnpoints, it should work.

4. More explicit error handling when an input file of the incorrect
format is used.

The most common error I have seen so far is the use of an input
turnpoint file of the incorrect type, hence #4 above. I currently
support only SeeYou (.CUP) and tab-delimited.

Since the information on the site is unlicensed, it is free and freely
redistributable. Happy downloading!

Lynn Alley
"2KA"