Help! Google satellite maps not fully appearing in Tower

I NEED HELP WITH TOWER: This has to do with Google satellite maps not fully appearing in Tower.

I am using the Samsung Tab S (with NO data plan) as my dedicated display. Here is whats going on or NOT going on as it were.

1. Before heading out to a flying field 7 miles from my home, in my living room I power up Solo, then turn on the transmitter, make sure the Tab S is connected to the Solo wireless hot-spot, then open the Solo app. In the Solo app I view the Google maps, find the location Im going to fly, then "Save" the map within the Solo app.

2. I can launch Tower simultaneously while Solo App is running as well, and in the Google maps display in Tower, sometimes the Google maps only partially load.

If I''m out in the flying field, everything ready to go, when I launch Tower, the flying field only displays the Google Earth maps view from a satellite altitude of about 1000 feet up. It will NOT let me zoom cin to teh max sat view which appears to be a resolution of approx 50 feet altitude. I'm sure Google posts exactly what the max "zoom in" on the say maps are.

Am I doing something wrong here?

What doesn't Tower use the "off line" maps I previously saved in the Solo app?

Is there a way to "tell" Tower to use the saved maps (saved in the Solo app) once at the actually flying location?

Thanks for any insights!

Doing that with a wi-fi tablet is kind of a pain, as you've found. What I do is pan to the area where I intend to go, and then zoom out so the entire area is visible on the map. Then I zoom in a bit, pan around and let all the tiles load (you can tell because they come "clear" after looking a bit blurry), then zoom in a bit more, lather rinse repeat until I'm down to the lowest altitude. The tiles are cached, and you should be good to go. There are 2 problems with this:

1. The fact you have to sit there and do this sort of nonsense, for one. It would be nice to hit a menu item and cache the area you're on. The quick and dirty way to do this programmatically would be for Tower to pan and zoom the map to all zoom levels in sequence to cover a given area. It might take a while, but at least you can set the tablet down and do something useful while it's caching the tiles.

2. Suppose you go to the flying field and make use of your map tiles, and then put your tablet away for 2 weeks and do nothing else with it. After a while, it seems Maps v2 (the SDK you're seeing put to use in the Tower app) decides you don't need those map tiles anymore, and clears them out. No idea why, it's not like they're occupying space needed by other tiles. It seems kind of arbitrary to me.

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Kelly Schrock July 26, 2015 at 9:39pm

Doing that with a wi-fi tablet is kind of a pain, as you've found. What I do is pan to the area where I intend to go, and then zoom out so the entire area is visible on the map. Then I zoom in a bit, pan around and let all the tiles load (you can tell because they come "clear" after looking a bit blurry), then zoom in a bit more, lather rinse repeat until I'm down to the lowest altitude. The tiles are cached, and you should be good to go. There are 2 problems with this:

1. The fact you have to sit there and do this sort of nonsense, for one. It would be nice to hit a menu item and cache the area you're on. The quick and dirty way to do this programmatically would be for Tower to pan and zoom the map to all zoom levels in sequence to cover a given area. It might take a while, but at least you can set the tablet down and do something useful while it's caching the tiles.

2. Suppose you go to the flying field and make use of your map tiles, and then put your tablet away for 2 weeks and do nothing else with it. After a while, it seems Maps v2 (the SDK you're seeing put to use in the Tower app) decides you don't need those map tiles anymore, and clears them out. No idea why, it's not like they're occupying space needed by other tiles. It seems kind of arbitrary to me.

This reply was deleted.

3DR SOLO

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