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HeyWhatsThat – Calculate viewshed and panorama for any point on Earth
- thatcherc 5y agoWhat a treat that the default location is Mt. Battie in Maine! I saw the tower up there from town just about every day growing up. Fun to see it pop up online!
- jlv2 5y agoAgreed. I climbed it 5 years ago, and immediately recognized the name.
- chrisshroba 5y agoI use the app PeakFinder all the time and it’s incredible for determining what mountain is what when you’re on the go!
- jlv2 5y agoI used to use PeakFinder, but then it was withdrawn and the free version disabled. Now it costs $5.
- sytelus 5y agoSomeone spent lot of time on developing it. This is one app that is absolutely worth $5.
- cracrecry 5y agoI suppose the app creator must be saying "Good riddance!" for every "user" that complains the free version of their product does not exist anymore. Usually the less people pay, the more demands on the developers.
- lultimouomo 5y agoAmong the best 5$ I've ever spent. This is a well polished app, which has non-trivial technical solutions (the AR view works very well and must not have been so simple to implement reliability on a miriad of different android devices). 5 dollars! C'mon.
- dessant 5y agoThanks so much for sharing, their website has just helped me to better understand the horizon of my city. https://www.peakfinder.org https://www.peakfinder.org
- bradknowles 5y agoThanks! I've been looking for an app like that....
- angst_ridden 5y agoI was just going to say the same. The mobile version is fantastic for when you're out in the field. The AR feature is really nice.
- matthewmcg 5y agoThis is very useful for vhf and uhf radio communications as well, which are normally* line of sight. In fact, the adsb-receiver[1] software package for setting up an aircraft tracking station includes a neat feature where you can use HeyWhatsThat to calculate maximum line of sight distances to aircraft at various altitudes and include these contours on your aircraft tracking map. * atmospheric phenomena such as density or humidity differences or reflections from other aircraft, the moon, or even meteors can enable reception over the horizon. [1] https://github.com/jprochazka/adsb-receiver/releases https://github.com/jprochazka/adsb-receiver/releases
- hunter2_ 5y agoNot to mention even higher bands, like PtP WiFi [1]. [1] https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/
- stavros 5y agoThis is also going to be interesting for figuring out the minimum altitude for maintaining the link to an RC airplane for a given distance.
- lesmond 5y agoWe actually added this as a feature to our sharing software at Plane Finder using our own modelling. If you sign up and then view your stats on the web you can compare your actual to the predicted. https://planefinder.net/coverage https://planefinder.net/coverage
- pridkett 5y agoIt’s also baked into tar1090[1] which is a little more maintained of a package and pretty easy to get set up if you’ve got an SDR and 1090MHz antenna to track planes. It’s a fun little hobby - where I live there really isn’t much of a reason to do it as there are enough other 1090MHz receivers in the area, but it still is cool when I look and see obscure jets flying overhead. [1] https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090 https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090
- dr_orpheus 5y agoNow I can confidently say I CAN see my house from here!
- wackget 5y agoI'm still waiting for an AR-style app which overlays the image from your phone camera with points of interest or GPS co-ordinates of distant places. Or hell, even just a map where you can turn your phone facing a general direction and see an approximate line of sight.
- tony_cannistra 5y agohttps://www.peakfinder.org/mobile/ https://www.peakfinder.org/mobile/
- ramses0 5y agoIn the early days of iOS there were tons of those apps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging#Wikipedia_article_geosearching_apps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging#Wikipedia_article_g... """One of the first attempts to initiate the geotagging aspect of searching and locating articles seems to be the now-inoperative site Wikinear.com, launched in 2008, which showed the user Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to one's current location. The 2009 app Cyclopedia works relatively well showing geotagged Wikipedia articles located within several miles of ones location, integrated with a street-view mode, and 360-degree mode."""
- stonogo 5y agoAh, well... To absent friends! https://www.wired.com/2012/05/hands-on-nokia-city-lens-beta-augmented-reality-for-your-lumia-phone/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/hands-on-nokia-city-lens-beta-...
- hdersch 5y agoGeoImageViewer, not an overlay but side-by-side view of photograph and maps. Clicking the image anywhere (not just precalculated pois) shows corresponding location in map and vice-versa. https://hdersch.github.io/ https://hdersch.github.io/
- bjterry 5y agoThere is a widely spread myth that Mt. Diablo in Oakland has the second largest viewshed in the world after Mt. Kilimanjaro[1]. With this tool you can actually compare them directly, which is pretty cool: Mt. Diablo: https://www.heywhatsthat.com/?view=K1JW43D4 https://www.heywhatsthat.com/?view=K1JW43D4 Mt. Kilimanjaro: https://www.heywhatsthat.com/?view=ME9CTRPG https://www.heywhatsthat.com/?view=ME9CTRPG 1: Debunked here: https://www.kqed.org/news/11808501/does-mount-diablo-have-the-biggest-view-in-the-world https://www.kqed.org/news/11808501/does-mount-diablo-have-th...
- thedookmaster 5y agoMt. Diablo is in Contra Costa County, not Oakland.
- jeffbee 5y agoThe way of getting the land area of the viewshed from this presentation is not immediately obvious.
- bjterry 5y agoMy non-scientific method was to put the two windows side-by-side, and click the "zoom out" button three times to eyeball the difference.
- idiotsecant 5y agoThis is a remarkably useful tool. Well done if you are the author!
- scott113341 5y agoIf you thing this is cool, also check out CalTopo (my favorite mapping software for backpacking): - https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=40.10094,-105.61557&z=15&b=mbh https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=40.10094,-105.61557&z=15&b=m... - Right click and select "Simulated View" - Change to "WireImagery" in the upper right
- ge96 5y agothat is cool, the history url thing... hit back like a thousand times can't get out, I get the reason but still
- nathancahill 5y agoI also love CalTopo, and this is a really cool feature. But once you switch to WireImagery, FATMAP gets you the same thing (but better).
- dillondoyle 5y agothis is AMAZING! It has really great detail for RMNP. I wish it had lighting. The weather.gov lat/lon graphs has it I wonder if that is a free source or something better. Snow depth too would be amazing
- bscphil 5y agoIt's interesting how the simulated view makes errors in the terrain data obvious. The view from Santa Cruz island (off the coast of California) is almost completely obscured by single-pointed errors in the height map along the coast that didn't get cleaned from the data: https://caltopo.com/view#ll=34.0505,-119.8665&e=30&t=n&z=3&c=15.45,10.37 https://caltopo.com/view#ll=34.0505,-119.8665&e=30&t=n&z=3&c...
- black_puppydog 5y agowow this is cool! but somehow the wireimagery setting doesn't work for any of the locations I've tried. it does work for the one you linked... Edit: oh... picked a random location in the USA instead and there it works. So... no Europe? what's up with that? Edit 2: also no south america apparently.
- imilk 5y agoWould be cool to use this same approach to calculate viewscores for properties, much like walkscore does.
- iaw 5y agoThis is really good work, I played around with a script to calculate this info from GIS data but the drawing of the view didn't even occur to me.
- joecool1029 5y agoWild, I was going to submit this to HN about a week ago and I hardly ever submit anything. Just slipped my mind. Weird how much the active users on this site think of similar stuff at the same time. This site also holds that distinction of being niche and useful enough for me to want to remember it but then I forget its name every so many years and have to ask around since it's hard to search it.
- stevep98 5y agoI’d like to be able to determine the location of a landscape photo. Should be able to calculate the panorama for 5x5 mile regions of earth, and use some matching algorithms to find the closest profile to my picture. I thought about this when watching geowizard: https://youtu.be/0ZbmYh9QZgA https://youtu.be/0ZbmYh9QZgA
- hdersch 5y agoI mentioned GeoImageViewer in a reply above. It contains several algorithms to determine the location of a landscape photo given some control points selected on a map. It is also able to determine lens parameters (fov, distortions,...). https://hdersch.github.io/ https://hdersch.github.io/
- jerrybender 5y agoAlso handy for finding cell phone ping ranges.
- jjwiseman 5y agoI can never remember what the name of this site is when I need to use it. I should set up a redirecting domain. Using HeyWhatsThat to check whether a Russian GPS jammer in Khmeimim Air Base in Syria would be able to affect aircraft over Cyprus and in Tel Aviv: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1502400086696869889 https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1502400086696869889
- bigDinosaur 5y agoWhy don't you create a bookmark with a name you can search on, like 'website used to do X that I always forget'?
- Thrymr 5y ago> I can never remember what the name of this site is when I need to use it. I should set up a redirecting domain. Have we reached a world where this is easier than bookmarks? Personally, I just look through all of my open tabs until I find the site I was looking for...
- sytelus 5y agoOne thing I constantly look for in new place is where can I see sunsets? Where can I see unobstructed views of town? Which hill in San Franscisco can I climb to see panoramic sunset? It would be great to take this tool to next level to answer such questions.
- addandsubtract 5y agoI was thinking the same thing. I recently found apps that let you see the direction of sunrises and sunsets (as well as moon directions) for any given location, but you wouldn't really know if the view is obstructed.
- beeskneecaps 5y agoSuper cool! I shared this with my HAM radio club. I think it could be a very useful tool for determining LOS for simplex communications!
- sytelus 5y agoAre there any open source version of such tool?
- oonerspism 5y agoNot automated, that I know of. However, you could replicate the functionality/outputs (for a given location) by using open source GIS software, any available free geospatial data, and basic long-established GIS techniques: the DEM, the cross section, and the viewshed.