I recently finished making link budget analysis for Abisko and Zackenberg. This was done for a PhD Wireless Sensor Network class that I am attending. After having a very interesting discussion in class about the wireless link budgets in both places, we decided to try to put all this in a place where people can access it and see it.

Google earth has a really cool feature that lets you make a tour on top of your maps (Play the embedded youtube video to learn more). I thought it would be cool to create a tour of Zackenberg and Abisko showing what we had discussed in class. These tours would contain things like 3D Fresnel zones and color charts showing the reach of the wireless signal within a terrain map.

As you could have noticed from the video, it is very easy to create a tour map. There is even a possibility of including some narration in the tour; which I chose to ignore, as I wanted something very simple. From this point I needed to be able to share my creation with the rest of the world. I wanted to avoid just putting a file (KMZ extension) on the on the web and expect people to just download it. Instead I found a video that explains how to embed the tour file into regular html code. One still has to upload the KMZ file to somewhere; but once that is done, it’s very easy. Checkout the next video that explains just how to do it. Here you will find the link to the gadget thingy.

This is all really cool until I found out that I and all linux users were probably not going to be able to see the embedded tour. The reason for this is that there is no google earth plugin for linux. There is a google earth for linux, but no plugin to use it in the browser. For all those linux user out there here is the link. The rest of you could have seen it in this post if wordpress.com would have allowed me to paste the html code to my post. Since this is not the case, I have to put it here for your viewing pleasure :) Might be time to move to wordpress.org ….