Getting the plates on your GRT HX EFIS or Your Hard Drive

Here is your landing zone for getting those NACO approach plates. Provided by the FAA NACO team, this script below will allow you to d/l those plates locally to your hard drive, USB stick, eBook, PDA, or whatever. Since these sites only allow you to get these one at a time. Its a pain. This script will allow you to get em all easily. My goal was to get all the plates, arrival and departure, as well as airport diagrams, locally, into a usable form to transportation on my usb stick to my plane. 

Get your current version v2.6 of the downloadplates.zip script and read the instructions please. License available also. NACO 28/56 day cycles here.

June 17th, 2009 v2.6

Fixed wget global variable bug

June 16th, 2009 v2.5

Added Mac Support

April 20th Update v2.4

added wget.exe to the root

added ip address support

added file size counts.

April 6th Update v2.3

Critical defect found with the wget -c command. Fixed. Added some other stuff in there.

March 28th, 2009 updatev2.1

Ive added the ability for you to select states, volumes, a debug mode, and a few other items. List of volumes here.

March 17th, 2009 updatev2.0

I have deprecated the old getallplates.zip files in favor of a new approach thats much more efficient. Also I talked GRT into not using the ICAO  airport identifier in favor of the FAA airport code instead. This made life easier.  Instructions with information on what it does is above. Simply this scripts gets you all the FAA approach plates in pdf form and stores them on your local box. From there you can do what you want. I needed to accomplish this so I could get the plates on a USB stick for use in my GRT EFIS system. You may find other interesting uses.

March 10, 2009

GRT has made available in version HHX1c beta the ability to display approach plates and airport diagrams in PDF form onto the box. Currently these are not geo referenced. Meaning its just a display of the plate just like you would have it on your paper version.

Once you have a waypoint loaded, you hit the plate button and it looks to the USB stick for a directory called plates and a subdirectory of the airport identifier. something like \plates\KLZU

What ever PDF is in that directory, it will display a list for you.

So, how do we get the plates? Well you can go to any aviation site one at a time and get em, or you can use my script to get them all. Save this file, unzip it and follow the instructions.txt file and your in business. Some pictures of the functionality.

FAA xml definitions file pdf, or xsd..

Enjoy.