Hi admahrou,
Interesting blog post, and im looking forward to reading part two in the urban canyons, its similar to what im doing in a way. Yes, it will be GPS planning, but for urban areas.
I had intended to get the details off the almanac, for GPS and Glonas at least. The transformation problem had occurred to me, but i hadnt thought it through properly, the issue of z values was causing me a bit of bother, because they would be so hugem i dnt know if arc will model them!
What I had been planning was making a table with time as the primary key, and then xyz for each satellite. Then if you interactively picked apoint on a map, and a time, you could get LOS to satellites. Like I said, this has been done, but Im not sure how to go about using the LOS tool properly, and was hoping someone could help here. The current LOS tool seems VERY manual, and not easy to use with bulk data. For example in one of the papers I found, they wrote some avenue code
Count = 0
for each aTarget 'possible observable satellite
if (aTIN.LineOfSightsAsShapes (anObserver, aTarget,
ListOfShapes) = True) then
Count = Count + 1
end
end
Any suggestions?