Building Your Own Airspace Files

The source information for the airspace files is the CAA website at Permanent Airspace or Temporary Airspace. This information is in PDF form which is not very useful for our purpose. Therefore it needs to be converted into a form that can be used by the software that loads the maps into the GPS. The basic process is to:

1. Download and save the file(s) you want form the CAA website (links above).
2. Open the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat and choose Save as Text... from the File menu.
3. Make any necessary corrections to the text files.
4. Use the converter to convert the file into the required format - see detailed description below.
5. Use the GPS software to load the file into the GPS - needs a more thorough description.

1. Download the CAA Files:

The source information for the airspace files is the CAA website at Permanent Airspace or Temporary Airspace. The files are named according to the type of airspace they include. Click on the files you are interested in and choose to save them to the local disk.

2. Convert the PDFs to Text:

Open each PDF file in Adobe Acrobat then choose "Save as Text" from the File menu. This option is not available in all versions of Acrobat, it is available in version 8. I recommend that you keep the same file name but change the extension to "txt".

3. Correct the Errors in the Text Files:

The airspace definitions published by the CAA are in a set of documents. These files are not in a format that can be loaded into a GPS directly. They must be converted into a different format first. Unfortunately the files are not easily machine readable. They loosely follow a format but there are many variations and inconsistencies in the syntax. This Airspace converter software is very forgiving of these inconsistencies and can read most of the CAA's files directly. There are however a few errors that cannot be resolved and these need to be corrected by hand before running the airspace converter. The errors I have discovered so far and the corresponding corrections are documented on the Corrections page.

4. Using the Airspace Converter:

Once you have converted the CAA's PDF files into text files and made any necessary corrections you are ready to convert the format. To do that you use the airspace.exe file which you will find attached to this page. To run the airspace converter open a cmd window (in Windows click Start, Run then type "cmd" and click OK). In the cmd window change to the directory that contains the text formated source files (this is the working directory). Then execute the airspace converter...

<path to airspace converter>\airspace.exe

You will need Java version 1.5 or later installed on your computer to use this software.

Modifying the configuration:

By default the airspace converter will convert all available input files into all the available output formats. You can modify this configuration by putting a file named airspace.xml in the working directory and customising the contents to suit your needs. An example airspace.xml file (equivalent to the default configuration) is attached to this page. Simply save this file to your working directory then edit it to comment out the features you do not need.

5. Load the File Into the GPS

When the conversion is complete you will have a bunch of output files in the working directory. The filenames and formats produced will be as configured in the airspace.xml file. Currently the supported output formats are TestFormat, which is used only for testing purposes, Polish Map (with .mp extension) which can be read by cGPSMapper and turned into Garmin format, fa5 which can be loaded directly into Brauniger and Flytec GPS/Varios and KML which can be viewed in Google Earth.

To produce maps that can be loaded into Garmin GPS devices we need to perform one additional step. To find out how to produce Garmin files from polish map files have a look at Building Garmin Map Sets.

The process for loading other formats will be documented later.