Hi Anders,

Unfortunately there isn't a way to make more towns visible other then zooming in closely. But given the purpose you describe, I wonder if there isn't anything smarter we can do to help? When you are in flightmode and hit the flightmode on/off button you already get a "Current situation report" that top right gives a phrase you can use to report your position to ATC. This is currently based on Airfields because we assume there are known to all controllers while smaller vllages might mean nothing to them. 

If this is unusable for you (for example distance to nearest airfield is too far) we could make it more smart to switch to using a navaid or if that is too far away also find the nearest biggest town in a specific radius. Just thinking out loud.....

If you know the name but are not sure of its position on the map, you can use the search function and its "view on map" button.

Also if you tap teh map anywhere, and use the aerodata (route) segment of teh info wheel, you get a list of the names of nearby places (also airfields & beacons, of course), sorted in order of proximity (I think). Unfortunately having seen teh list of placenames, all you can do currently is insert or append one to your route, or set up a "direct to" it. Perhaps it owudl be useful if that screen also had a "view on map" button as well as insert/append/DirectTo ???

In terms of more town names appearing on the map, in relatively densely populated countries and areas, clearly we can only "afford" to show larger towns and must hide villages except when highly zoomed it. But I'm not sure whether the settings for that are "global" or whether they could be varied country by country so it works better in sparsely-inhabited countries, or even if regions of countries could be classified by "village density" so that for example one setting would be used within 20 nm of Stockholm and a very different setting applied in the far north. In the end, it is not the number of inhabitants that is the real factor that should decide what to show on the map, it is the number of inhabitants in the context of the number and size of other settlements in the vicinity that counts!

Thanks a lot for your replies!

I did not know about the possibility to tap the flightmode button to get a report, that is certainly a neat feature that I will try to use from now on! Although, I do agree that where airfields are far apart, which they certainly are in the northern part of the country, one might want to use something else. I often use IFR waypoints to report my position as well, but maybe that is not the correct way when flying VFR? Maybe configurable for me to choose what might be included in the search?

I also did not think about the possibility to tap on a town and find the name in the route display, that also helps a bit.

Looking into this a bit further, I noticed now that I actually never get to see any town names at all on my iPad 4 mini regardless of zoom level or whether I wait a bit or not. I do see them on my desktop PC, and there it looks pretty reasonable. Did I by mistake turn off the name display on the iPad, is the hardware too old or something?

My memory of being able to find town names on the iPad comes from EV3, where I think that the presentation of town names actually was pretty good, for me.

Hi,

I raised this issue of clarity of small town names not being easily visible on the mapping in Ev4 a couple of years ago but I think the answer I got at the time was nothing could be done to change it.

The problem I think is the italic style format used for the naming of small towns in Ev4 and also the density of colour(grey) being used. If a different format, maybe Arial or similar was used and in a denser black colour used I think it would substantially improve small town recognition.

Alan

I can't see any town names at all on my iPad. They are supposed to be there, right? I can see them on EV4 on my home computer but not at all on my iPad regardless of zoom level. I do think they looked quite alright on EV3, at least for my purposes.

If you cannot see any on the iPad then it sounds like they somehow are turned off. Look at the LAYERS menu (leftmost button at bottom of screen) and in there open the Aerodata menu and in there check that there is a green”LED” for “Places”. 

Great to hear that that fixed it! Never worry about raising questions here, Anders, that's what we're here for!

BTW, in Menu>System>Readability>Aerodata Text you can adjust the size of the text labels for all aerodata items, which includes the town names.

VBR

Stu

Just downloded 4.0.929 and opened the UK Airspace chart airspace chart style.....A big improvement in clarity of towns etc and a big thumbs up from me!! ?.....well done!

Just one point though, disused airfields are depicted in bright red?.....think they maybe need toning down just a shade.

Alan.

Edit:- Hmmm....Something strange going on re my comment about disused airfields showing in bright red colour on the UK Airspace chart version. It appears that my comment about them being in bright red is only on the Windows version. I have  now downloaded .929 Android version on to my Samsung S2 tablet and disused airfields are not named at all in this version? So a bit of inconsistant discrepancy going on betweeen Windows version and Android version it seems.

Alan.

Hi Dave,

Did you note my comment about the Android version and disused airfields?

Just tried again with .929 on Samsung Galaxy S2 and disused airfields and the disused airfields only show in bright red on inital loading. If you zoom in/out the disused afield names completely disappear!

Alan.