somehow skydemon shows mainly names of very small towns but does not show names of larger towns. is there a setting i have messed up that can fix that?

here is an exmaple.. look at the town "Turbenthal" which is a quite small town, and compare it to "Neubrunn" which is basically a collection of about 20 houses. I would expect SkyDemon to show me the name of Turbenthal rather than Neubrunn, but it does the opposit. When i make a call to a local airfield and i tell them i am overhead Neubrunn nobody knows where i'm at, but when i tell them i am overhead turbenthal, people understand. This is true both in flight planning mode and in navigation in flight. any idea what i did wrong?

here is a comparison of the skydemon screenshot (zoomed all the way in to show these two towns with maximum detail) compared to a map that depicts every building in the town as a black rectangle.



Skydemon knows Turbenthal, i pops up as a result when i search for the name and its area is shown on the map. Pleasae help me in getting my settings right. 

EDIT: when i switch off "Urban Areas" in the surface features settings, Turbenthal is completely hidden, it doesn't even get a yellow dot.

EDIT2: this is with skydemon 3.6.2 on a google nexus 6p

regards
Pascal

Unfortuantely the town population data we have for Switzerland is not as accurate as it could be, and towns do not always have their individual populations recorded correctly. In this instance, for example, Neubrunn and Turbenthal both apparently have a population of 4067. I'm sure this isn't the case in real life, but it's the only data our mapping engine has available when it comes to deciding what towns are visible at what zoom levels. In most cases it gets it right, but with smaller towns which have both been given identical population figures, occasionally the less appropriate town will be shown. There isn't much we can do about this at the moment.

Update: I tried switching to backup population data that we have, and that appears to have produced a better result in this case. I will publish the next Switzerland chart using this data and will await feedback. Possibly, the issue will be solved.

Oh i see what the problem is: in switzerland we have towns and we have municipalities . a larger town is also a municipality while smaller towns can be attached to larger ones so they don't have to have their own administration. I just googled Neubrunn and found out that this is exactly the case here: Turbenthal is the main town and Neubrunn, Hutzikon, Oberhofen, Ramsberg, Schmidrüte and what so ever belong to the same administration. that's probably the reason why you have the same population for both Neubrunn and Turbenthal and maybe also for the other towns. I believe though i have just found your missing link from an official source:
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/infothek/nomenklaturen/blank/blank/gem_liste/04.html
This is a list of all Towns in Switzerland, published by the federal office for statistics. In the excel sheet you see a column called "Ortname" which is the name of the town, and in the column "GDENAMK" is the name of the municipality the town belongs to. If you could merge this with your data and then simply display the municipalities rather than the small towns that belong to them i think the problem at hand would be solved.

regards
Pascal

Another, similar, problem I found with the running position report information which SD keeps handy near the top of the window. Often times it references a small town which no controller would have heard of. I think the better result would be to use either large towns (population >25.000) or stick to aeronautical features (navaids, airports, reporting points, etc.) exclusively. That way it would be ensured the controller knew what I was talking about.

Greetings, -- Chris.

Hi Pascal, hopefully the solution I alluded to above will resolve this. Our alternate data does appear to correctly break down populations. If the next chart update still has issues in this regard, we will have to schedule some development time to investigate your suggestion.

Chris, the position report is already driven from the zoom factor threshold associated with towns, which is ultimately derived from population data. I therefore believe that the solution I mentioned above will stop what you're seeing from happening in Switzerland. If you have a specific example elsewhere I'll be happy to look into it, but we already make that position report only look at towns which are visible at 1:750k scale.

Thanks Tim for taking care of this so quickly, i'll check after the next update and give you some feedbak.

Tim, I set the scal to 750k and checked which towns were still visible. I found many small towns with populations around 2.000-3.000 which were still visible at that scale. An example: Pöggstall (pop. 2.461 as of Jan 1, 2016), which is located 6 nm south of LOAA. No controller would ever have heard of that unless he grew up in that area.

It seems that you have unreliable census data on municipalities. Therefore it might be better to rely only on aeronautical features.

-- Chris.

Yeah, but in most countries, the data is perfectly reliable. I'm not about to switch off the report-relative-to-town feature (which is used extensively) because a few small towns in certain countries are incorrectly displayed at large scales. That is not the solution.

Tim,

Just checked and found about 10 'towns' in Germany in the nearer area I'm living in shown at a scale of 750k. All do have a population between < 1,000 and 6,000 and no controller would ever have heard about them. These are situated in a small part of Germany, so I estimate there are more than 300 of these throughout Germany, which is more than a few.

I sometimes had a problem reporting my position, because the position report at the top of the window was referencing to a town, which even I never had heard of, although I live in that area.

Eric