[aprssig] MapQuest Maps for Findu.com

[Steve Dimse]

On Apr 17, 2005, at 9:05 PM, ke4nyv at hamhud.net wrote:

> Somthing I always wondered is why we could'nt work a deal with the 
> PMap guys in
> that we take all of their mapping data and "host" it.  They have 
> always seemed
> to work with hams in the past, ie. PMMap, WinAPRS, ect.
>
Realize that they don't really 'work' with hams. They sell a 
programmers kit that allows one to write programs that make use of 
their CD. They make their real money from the fact that users must buy 
a CD to use the program. In the case of the internet, they charge a 
royalty fee on the maps generated.

This is a North American only solution, nearly a third of findU maps 
are from elsewhere in the world, I suspect other client programs have 
similar distributions.

Even if you don't care about the rest of the world (I certainly cannot 
take that position) the developers kit is $499, and in order to 
distribute the maps over the internet you must pay a per-map fee, which 
they do not place on the web site, but findU uses well over  a million 
maps a month, even a tenth of a penny gets you into the thousands of 
dollars a month. Next, it is a Windows only program, so there needs to 
be a Windows server placed and maintained on the internet, the usual 
suspects stay away from Windows. Finally, someone must write the code 
to receive an incoming request and return the map, this is not included 
in the programmers kit.

There is a royalty-free US TIGER data only version called publisher 
with a $500/year license, but it does not appear to have a programming 
interface and produces PDF, so it is probably not useful in this 
application without some major hacking.

If anyone does implement this and is willing to pick up the tab on the 
per-map fees, I'd be glad to have findU take advantage of it...

Steve K4HG