Roger is part of the way through the process of creating a new TrueBasic version of the Etgtab.exe computer program that generates both ocean tide and Solid Earth Tide types of data. Upon checking I see that it does in fact generate ocean tide data.

One thing we will need to do whether or not he is successful with that code translation effort is to check the ocean tide data the program generates against data from another source to make certain that the Etgtab.exe data are accurate. Generating accurate ocean tide data appears to be a complex operation. And I am wondering if a program as simple as Etgtab.exe can actually generate accurate data of that type. We shall see.

According to the documentation, Etgtab.exe was originally written by the late Prof. Hans-Georg Wenzel and perhaps some of his colleagues back around 1996. I know that its compiled Fortran version runs as I have been using it for years. It also has a Basic version. I don’t know if that one will run.

If the program cannot be easily translated into TrueBasic then we will probably just use the already operational Etgtab.exe version. Time Window and location data can be fed to it by the Perl EPmap program. And the TrueBasic EPmap program can process the output data from the Etgtab.exe program so that they can be displayed using the Gnuplot chart generation program.

It took a while to learn how to get all of these programs to work together to generate charts. But the routines we developed appear to be working quite well.

Another effort getting underway today involves getting a download version of the latest EPmap program prepared and stored at my Web site. That will hopefully be done some time this week.

The EPmap program name will also probably be changed to something else as there is a commercial computer program that has that name. Our original “EPmap” program name was selected just to help get the program development effort started. Now that the program is up and running we want to make certain there are no conflicts with commercially available software.