<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Many thanks to Richard Dulvenvoorde for helping me connect with the Developer community.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Greetings from Michigan!</span><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">I work on a search and rescue team that wishes to move to QGIS for use in printing maps, deploying teams to search segments of the search area, and tracking clues / search assets. I have already used the system (3.2) as it is today and find it to be far superior to what we have used in the past. In preparation for this, we have obtained sat maps and topos of the lower peninsula of Michigan (our coverage area) and will shortly obtain street maps covering the same area to develop the appropriate layers for our maps. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">After a short search of the available packages for the system, I don’t see any that match our needs, though I’ve just been using the search terms I am familiar with, and being a newbie, could have easily missed something. I don’t expect what we need will have much application or be of interest to others, so I won’t be surprised if we need to start from scratch. What I would like is some ideas of existing packages I can steal shamelessly from to build what we need. Or if it already exists, a push to the right package(s) or the right user group that may already cover this turf. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">I see you have all the tools we will need for our maps (except perhaps grid convergence), which should make this relatively easy. I don’t see any packages that are scripted to walk through the process we currently use to define search areas using R. Koester’s behavioral category rings. And so I am committed to developing a script todo this in our first phase of development.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Our plan is to develop a script that will:</span></div><div><ol class="MailOutline"><li><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Define the IPP (initial Planning Point) for the search and mark the map accordingly</span></li><li><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Mark other search assets (Staging / Incident Command / Net Control, etc)</span></li><li><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Constrain the visible / map area to the 95th percentile of Probability of Area (or Containment).</span></li><li><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Place Koester rings on the map for the 25 / 50 / 75 / 95 POAs and for our 300m initial search area.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Index all maps with magnetic declination and grid convergence for our navigator's easy reference</span></li><li><span style="font-size: 14px;"> Save PDF versions of the SAT/TOPO/Street maps to a remote folder for retrieval as the search progresses.</span></li><ol class="MailOutline"><li><span style="font-size: 14px;">At various scales and indexed for retrieval by area / scale</span></li></ol></ol><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">If this works as I hope, we will begin planning work on a second phase to use automation to segment the search area into acceptable chunks a ground team or canine team can tackle in a given working period. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Any help is appreciated. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Have fun,</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">John Hutcheson</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Midland County Search and Rescue</span></div></body></html>