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

03/18/2017. This is no longer being maintained.

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 v4.4 of the downloadplates.zip script and read the instructions please. License available also. NACO 28/56 day cycles here.

Update 03/14/2015 Its more cat and mouse games with the FAA and their XML catalog file which is the heart of knowing what plates to download. Ive updated to the new catalog location which seems to be about 2 weeks late to publish to this new location. So while it may use an out of date catalog file, the files it downloads are current, you just might be missing a few new ones until the new catalog file is published. You should run, downloadplates.pl --forceupdate yes, to get everything up to date the first time around. Not a bad idea to go ahead and delete your plates folder first in order to start fresh before downloading all the files.

Update 3/30/2014.

FAA changed a few things. Back up and working now.

Update December 1, 2012

Back in operation. Location of xml catalog file found. If you have not updated your plates in a while, please use the downloadplates.pl --forceupdate  yes to get all of the current plates.

 

Update November 24, 2012

So for many months the key ingredient for getting this tool  to work has been the lack of available XML catalog file from the FAA. VERY FRUSTRATING. So I have a temporary source for the catalog file and im putting it up on my server for the tool to retrieve it. Good news is that it makes the script work. Bad news is that it is something that I have to do each cycle and in all likelihood I WONT!. But at least our plates will be semi-up to date and that is better than not working at all. Pay attention to your logfile.txt it will tell you when the files you are getting are outdated. Actually the files you retrieve are current, but there may be NEW plates in the current cycle that I dont know about and don't get. ALSO since its been a very long time since this script has worked, delete ALL YOUR PLATES locally, and use the command downloadplates.pl --forceupdate  yes to get them all. I recommend using this command FROM NOW ON until we can get this FAA catalog file stuff resolved. Sorry for the lousy solution. Please send all hostile emails to the FAA!

 

 

UPDATE May 6th, 2012.

As a result of changes by the FAA to charge for the digital chart services. This entire application of mine is broken until further notice. If you find a way to get the xml catalog, Im all ears.

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Mr. Stewart: 
We are no longer providing the xml file for the d-TPP product on-line.  It is available on the d-TPP DVD, which can be obtained by going to http://faacharts.faa.gov/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=DTPP  . 
Best Regards,
Jim Grant
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AeroNav Webmaster
Federal Aviation Administration
301-427-5126
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June 14, 2011

FAA changed the directory location.

 

January 6, 2011 v2.9

Cleaned up some old code. Fixed problem with slashes spaces and periods in city names for the statefolders options so directory writes dont get rejected.

 

August 8, 2010 v2.8

Feature enhancement. Added switch to store the plates by state by city. If your a GRT user this will be of no use. But for the rest of the planet this will be useful. So now if you want to just store these plates  in a useable file structure where the folders are \plates\Alabama\Montgomery\BHM you can now do so. This makes a lot of sense for most folks. Smart PDA's, iPads, inflight notebooks, your computer, etc. Se instructions for using this switch. I also deprecated the startover function as it was just too difficult to implement cross platform. So now it you want to start over, delete your plates directory yourself  and use the --forceupdate yes switch.

 

August 6, 2010 v2.7

FAA changed its URL location.

 

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.

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