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A Guide to American Pond Hunting.

This little tutorial should be all you need to track down ponds in Cambodia, sadly this guide is useless outside of the Kingdom, so lucky us for having this info.

Many thanks go out to the Yale University in the USA for releasing this data.

And so on, your first step is a click away...

http://gis.library.yale.edu/website/cgp/Run.htm

After clicking the link above you should see this screen slowly appearing,


click the boxes to view the US bombing sites and the large scale map,



now click on the refresh button, scroll down if you can't see it.  I am pretty sure it will take a long time to fill that screen so have a look at the controls you will need to use.


Click on the tool and then on the map, i.e. if you want to zoom out, click on the zoom out button and then the map, remember not to be too quick though.

By now the rash should be appearing on your screen, all air strikes of one sort or another but zoomed too far out to see whats what, so you need to master the zoom tool right away.


 Now we have zoom sorted lets hone in on the interesting stuff, finding Ponds.
 

I have picked a spot we already know to be a bombing site but it shows the principle nicely, Utopia near Tek Chhou.

You now need to try the info button, click it and hit a red dot, I have done the one that hit the Utopia site in 1973.


If you hit the red dot accurately you should be greeted with all available info on that strike, inc type of aircraft, weapons used and what the target may be, where known.
 

Our next step is to fire up GoogleEarth, if you have not already got it grab it from the link below.

http://www.google.com/earth/index.html
Once you have a working GoogleEarth we have to make sure our GIS system speaks the same language. 

Go to tools, options, and then set "show lat/long" to Decimal Degrees.



Here is our chance to use the coordinates we got from the Yale GIS.

Place a placemark on the GoogleEarth map, hopefully close to Utopia, then right click on it and choose properties,



now copy and paste the coordinates we got from the Yale GIS system,


the placemark has moved the the position of the airstrike, we can zoom in a bit to prove it too.


Spot on I think you will find but a shame these Ponds cannot be seen from the air.


Anyway, enough of that banter lets have another go, this time we are off towards Kep and the not so secret lake.

Using the same technique lets have a look at this little red dot and its coordinates, plug them into a placemark, zoom out if you loose sight of the wee fella.



So after saving the new placemark you can go and see it, don't expect the Pond to be exactly on the spot, apparently accurate Pond deployment was very difficult.

You now have to look for the prospective Ponds, I can see them high in the picture.


A great tool that GoogleEarth has is a measure, it can help you identify objects more easily and is handy for measuring Ponds, here we have measured the distance from target to hit.


Here is a close up of the 1000lb Ponds dropped 450m from their target.


Well I hope you find this Tutorial useful, if you do please get back to us.