How to use LTA PzMap for OziExplorer

The window at a glance

Everything happens in one window. Top to bottom, it walks you through the same workflow every time: sign in, pick where you're flying, choose what to load, and hit Preload.

• 1Settings — sign in and point the app at your OziExplorer install.
• 2Festival area — optionally snap to a festival you've RSVP'd to.
• 3Start point — type a lat/lon, search a place, or use a festival.
• 4Radius — how far around the start point to pull, up to 50 mi.
• 5Layers — tick which data to download.
• 6Preload — fetch everything and push it into OziExplorer.

Sign in

Click Settings… in the top-right. Enter the email and password for your ltapzmap.com account and click Sign in. The app trades them for an API key it stores locally — your password is never saved.

• 1Your ltapzmap.com email + password. No account yet? Sign up free at ltapzmap.com first.
• 2Sign in. On success the dialog closes and the main window shows ‘Signed in as…’

Choose your area

There are three ways to set the centre of what you'll download:

• Type it — paste a lat, lon straight into the box (e.g. 35.0844, -106.6504).
• Search — click Search… and type a city, ZIP code, FAA identifier, or ICAO code.
• Festival — pick one you've RSVP'd to from the Festival dropdown to use its exact area.

• 1Type a place and press Enter — ABQ, Albuquerque, 87101, KDEN all work.
• 2Pick a result and click Use this start point to drop it into the main window.

Set the radius

In Radius around start point, set how far out to pull data and choose the unit (mi, km, or nm). The cap is 50 mi — plenty for a flight or an event. A bigger radius means more features and a larger offline-tile download, so keep it tight for a single launch site.

Pick layers

Tick what you want in Layers to download. Use All / None to toggle everything at once. Available layers:

• FAA obstacles — towers, antennas, buildings (FAA DOF + OpenAIP)
• Controlled airspace — Class B/C/D/E, SUA, TFR, OpenAIP worldwide
• Protected lands — NPS parks, USFWS refuges, Wilderness
• Tribal lands · Prison boundaries · Power lines
• Airports (FAA NFDC) · Skydive drop zones
• Waypoints & Pilot zones — community-drawn pins and polygons
• Flight tracks — your own recorded GPS trails
• Power plants — EIA generating stations (all / ≥500 MW / nuclear)
• Industrial sites — substations, landfills, quarries, strip mines, military bases
• Zoos — ~800 US zoos & animal parks (stay 2,000+ ft AGL)
• UAS Facility Map + DROTAMs — FAA LAANC drone-ceiling grid + drone NOTAMs
• Historical flights — famous balloon flights 1783–today

Max features per layer caps how many of each come back (default 2000) — raise it for dense areas, lower it to keep the file small.

Offline basemap

Tick Pre-download a basemap for this area to grab map tiles you can use with no cell signal in the field. Pick a source and a maximum zoom; the app shows a live estimate of how many tiles and roughly how many megabytes before you commit.

• 1Source — OpenStreetMap, USGS topo, Esri / Google / Bing satellite, or MapTiler.
• 2Max zoom — higher = sharper when zoomed in, but many more tiles. 14 is a good default.
• 3Live estimate — watch this before hitting Preload so you don't start a huge download.

Gridlines

Tick Include gridlines at the bottom of the layer list to add a UTM 1 km grid and a lat/lon graticule as track overlays — handy for calling positions or estimating distances on the map.

Preload into OziExplorer

Click the big Preload into OziExplorer button. The app fetches each layer, merges everything, and loads it into OziExplorer — opening OziExplorer first if it isn't already running. Progress shows in the Status box at the bottom.

One Preload writes a single tidy set of files:

Find a feature

Two buttons below Preload help you jump to something specific:

• Find feature in radius… searches ltapzmap.com inside your current area — every obstacle, airport, airspace, etc., whether or not you've loaded that layer.
• Find in loaded data… searches only what you already pulled this session — instant, no network.

Pick a result and, when OziAPI is connected, the app pans OziExplorer straight to it.

Troubleshooting

Something flashed by — what went wrong?

Click View log (top-right). Every status message and any error — with full detail — is written to a log file that survives crashes. That's the first place to look if a Preload doesn't do what you expected.

Everything loads but the basemap is missing

OziExplorer's command line loads the waypoints but not always the basemap. Enable OziAPI in OziExplorer (Configuration → OziAPI) so the app can load all of it, or load the .map manually via Map → Load and Calibrate.

Two OziExplorer windows opened

Your OziExplorer file association opens a fresh copy per file. Enabling OziAPI fixes this — the app then loads through the API into a single window.

Nothing happens after Preload

Make sure OziAPI.dll and the Ozi Data folder are set in Settings, and that OziExplorer is installed in a standard location so the app can find OziExplorer.exe. The Status box and View log will name the exact problem.